Hubert Skidmore (1909–1946) was an American writer. His twin brother was novelist Hobert Skidmore, and he was married to the novelist Maritta Wolff, writer of Whistle Stop and a fellow student at the University of Michigan, in 1942. He died in a house fire in 1946. He is best known for his social protest novel Hawk's Nest, an account of the disaster at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia during the Great Depression. Skidmore's novels divide into three groups. River Rising!, Hill Doctor and Hill Lawyer, which are juvenile literature, form a loose trilogy around York Allen, who works as a schoolteacher in a rough logging community to earn money for medical school, then returns as a doctor to treat the illnesses and injuries of the people of rural West Virginia. I Will Lift Up My Eyes and its sequel Heaven Came So Near concern the difficult transition of the Cutlip family as they move from their isolated farm to live and work in a lumber camp. Hawk's Nest chronicles the experience of a wide range of representative characters as they are touched by the disaster surrounding the construction of the Gauley Bridge tunnel. Major themes All of Skidmore's novels take place in his native West Virginia, and his first five novels are deeply concerned with the travails of the "hill people" confronting environmental and economic pressures. In River Rising!, isolation, ignorance and poverty have contributed to the deaths by pneumonia of York Allen's parents, and he vows to become a doctor to help the farm families of the remote hollows of Appalachia. The Cutlip family of I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes live an idyllic life on their remote farm, but drought forces them off the land, and Mr. Cutlip takes work in the lumber camp. The troubles of rural farm life are not mitigated by economic progress, however. As the lumber operations (and later, in Hill Lawyer, coal companies) become prevalent, quality of life diminishes. But the faceless corporations are not the only villains; greed and desperation make the small-time farmers and loggers prey on each other. The lumber camps are rough, dangerous places where family solidarity is challenged. At first the Cutlips prosper, but after Nat Cutlip is killed in a logging accident, his family suffers economic and social troubles. By the end of Heaven Came So Near, Maw Cutlip is reduced to a subsistence existence of combing the