Based on the eulogy delivered by his uncle April 26, 2026
It was 2001, and Sheldon Lee Compton needed a job.
“Any dumb hillbilly can learn to operate a forklift in ten minutes.” That’s what Steve, Parts Manager at the Caterpillar store, told my nephew Sheldon on his first and last day on the job.
Sheldon had taken the job with some trepidation. He was a newspaper man currently between jobs, a roving reporter one might say. He had been hired on my dubious recommendation. I toiled in the undercarriage office, writing work orders and taking calls from irate customers, a factotum, sort of like the poet Charles Bukowski.
I was on my nine o’clock break, drinking coffee and eating a stale honey bun from the vending machine, when Steve rang my extension.
He said, “I hate to tell you, but I had to let your nephew go.”
“Let him go! He just started. You mean you canned him?”
“Canned, axed, the old boot–I had no choice.”
“Lord, what has he done?”
“You ain’t gonna believe it. I had him on Number 4, the newest and safest tow motor on the hill. In less than an hour he turned over two pallets of gear grease, scattered a bin of o-rings to hell and back, busted nine bags of oil dry and ran over the day truck driver’s foot. It’s some kind of record.”
I fumbled for words, needing to say something in my nephew’s defense. I felt a vicarious responsibility for his ineptitude, for this calamitous conclusion of his employment. “Sheldon is a good writer,” I said, rather lamely.
“Writer, my ass! I don’t need Hemingway here. I need a forklift operator. A writer, is he? When you see Sheldon, tell him I said to write a novel, write a poem, write obituaries–write his granny, but stay the hell away from manual labor. The world will be a safer place!”
It was good advice and Sheldon took it, quite literally.
Twenty-five years later Sheldon Lee Compton is remembered as one of the most accomplished and well-loved writers in Appalachian literature.
From the time he was a child, Sheldon Compton had one goal in life, to be a published writer. When he was a skinny little fellow of eleven, he would come to me carrying a grimy little composition book and a new story he had written. I had published several stories and poems myself, here and there, and he thought I ought to know something. “Tell me if it’s any good,” he’d say hopefully. After treating myself to some wild adventure from his big imagination, I would hand it back. “It’s pretty good,” I’d say, patting him on the back. “Now, let’s see how we can make it better.”
I don’t claim to be a great teacher, but I’m prepared to defend the advice I gave him as he grew older. “You can’t become a writer without first becoming a reader.” I told him, not too gently. “Read voraciously. Read Flaubert, Melville and Thomas Wolfe. Read Don Quixote and Rabalais for the fun of it. Read Henry James and Faulkner to learn how not to write. Read James Still and Flannery O’Conner to learn how to write. Avoid brainless bestsellers. They have nothing to teach you. Imitate no one. Find your own voice.
“Write only if you have to,” I warned Sheldon. “It’s a hard life, but a true writer has no choice.”
It was a hot day in June 2012. A nervous Sheldon Lee Compton was signing copies of his first book, The Same Terrible Storm, on a back street in Pikeville, Kentucky. The turnout was small, but he didn’t seem to mind. This was the biggest day of his life. He gave me a big bear hug and handed me a free copy. Inside he had inscribed these words: “There is simply not enough room here to thank you. This happened by your example.” Deserved or not, it was all the thanks I needed.
Ernest Hemingway said, “an unhappy childhood is the best training for a writer.” This is not to say that Sheldon’s childhood was always unhappy, especially when he joined his fun-loving cousins at his grandparents’ house in Virgie, Kentucky. Tom, Gary, Todd, Sheldon, Rosa and Suzette, hyped up on Slurpees, Hi-Noon bars and 16-ounce Pepsi, would cause Satan to have a nervous breakdown.
Sheldon was born to Orville Lee Compton and Loretta Mullins on April 23, 1976, at Pikeville, Kentucky. Sheldon was five-year-old when his parents divorced in 1981. Two years later he was placed in the care of his paternal grandparents, Teddy and Avalene Compton, at Virgie. The little coal community on rural highway 610 in Pike County would become his home for the next eight years. Virgie offered little in the way of entertainment for the average boy in the 1980s. With his big imagination, Sheldon was no average boy. Whet Junior’s Ashland station, Dale Trivette’s Trucking, Bob’s Barber Shop, Hamilton’s Five and Ten, John Blair’s Restaurant, Virgie High School, and a cast of colorful locals. now vanished, come vividly to life within the pages of his stories and novels.
In “Dangerous Stories” (see excerpt below) he proves Baudelaire’s maxim that “Genius is childhood recaptured.”
Sadly, too much of Sheldon’s childhood was spent in the dark shadow of his father, a brilliant but troubled veteran of the Vietnam Conflict. Unemployed, he lived with his parents in the same house with his son. Without apology, he retreated to a back room that reeked of tobacco smoke and despair spending his days reading Schopenhauer and studying calculus. His father’s troubles became an incubus that would ride Sheldon’s back throughout his life. He sought refuge in his writings and found inspiration for several novels, most notably, Dysphoria, a confessional Appalachian Gothic.
Ironically, it was Sheldon’s father, who recognized his son’s potential, encouraged him to read and helped him get his first library card. In an essay called “Dangerous Stories,” Sheldon recalls one of the most exciting days in a nine-year-old boy’s life, the grand opening of the Vesta Roberts Library at Virgie.
“I was the second person issued a library card. The first was my father who promptly directed me to the juvenile biography section. I wouldn’t emerge from this section for another three years. In that time, I read every book published in what collectively remain my favorite books of all time, the Childhoods of Famous American series. After a time, reading the books wasn’t enough. I wanted to write my own.”
Sheldon Lee Compton’s meteoric career has produced an astounding body of work, both fiction and nonfiction. Adam Van Winkle, editor of Cowboy Jamboree Press, called him “a giant, a talent like no other.” Writing in the twin genres of Southern Grit Lit and Appalachian Noir, the domain of Chris Offutt, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah and Donald Ray Pollack, he has written fifteen books and appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
The novel, The Old Invisible, Shark Life, a prose poetry collection, and Fallujah Boy and Other Stories are being published posthumously.
His novels, short stories and essays have earned him numerous awards and honors. He has been nominated twice for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing. In 2012 he was a finalist for both the Still Fiction Award and the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award. His stories have been cited in Best Small Fictions for 2015, 2016 and 2022. He was also the editor of Airgonaut, a journal of narrative concerns.
Like one of his favorite literary gods, Los Angles street poet Charles Bukowski, Sheldon worked at a variety of menial jobs, slate picker at a coal mine, for instance, as well as some lucrative and prestigious ones. He called it “surviving.” Combined they provided an eclectic background for his stories. At age 14, and a sophomore in high school, he became a stringer for the Floyd County Times, covering local sports. He would work for the Times, off and on for many years. After graduating from the University of Pikeville, he taught briefly at the Piarist School in Martin. After receiving his MFA degree in Creative Writing at Spalding University, he taught for one year at Big Sandy Community and Technical College, before returning to journalism.
For seven years he was a Kentucky Board Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor at Behavioral Health Group in Paintsville. From 2020 to 2024 he taught in the Master of Fine Arts program at Concordia University in St Paul. At his death he was employed by Mountain Top Media in Pikeville as news reporter and sports director.
One wonders how he ever found time to write.
One year ago, I reviewed his novel Angels of Oblivion on Goodreads and Amazon. I was much taken by the story of a dysfunctional Appalachian family besieged by alcohol addiction and trapped between love and reality. I held my breath when I came across the words: “An evening radiance of cardinals.” It was a line worthy of John Keats or Mary Oliver. Quintessential Sheldon Lee Compton, it is what David Joy called “the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet.”
“April is the cruelest month,” This bold opening line of T.S. Eliot’s epic poem “The Wasteland” presages something of the tension between life and death, hope and despair. I never understood the truth or knew the heartbreak of those words until this moment. It has been four years, almost to the day, when I last talked to my nephew Sheldon. We had both been inexcusably “too busy.” When I turned eighty-one last November, I was thinking how it won’t be long before Sheldon, perhaps with a tear in his eye, would be standing in this very spot struggling to say something nice about his old uncle. Fraught with guilt I keep asking God why it turned out this way.
Following a massive heart attack and intensive surgery at age thirty-seven, Sheldon told his mother he would never live to be fifty. At the time, he had published three books, been married and divorced three times, and fathered two children, a son, Tyler Lee, by his first wife Carrie, and a daughter, Natalie Grace, by his second wife, Linda. Despite his experience as an alcohol and drug counselor, when it came to alcohol, he did not always heed his own counsel. He was also a heavy smoker. He had settled into a long and happy relationship with Heather McCoy, when he succumbed to a second heart attack April 13, 2026. He was ten days away from his fiftieth birthday.
Why did Sheldon Lee Compton become a writer? In an interview with Bull, a men’s fiction magazine, he talks about a single event in his life that left him no choice.
“One of my earliest short stories was one in which I killed a young boy. It was called “The Snowman” and written when I was about twelve years old. Writing the story had no profound or lasting impression on me, but the impression and resulting actions by my father in response to reading the story is the beginning of my origin story as a writer. My father read the story and became worried something was wrong with me, a kid who is killing kids in stories. He forced me to throw away all my Stephen King books. He stood beside me while I threw them one by one into the creek beside our house. That [expletive] gave birth to a writer at that moment; if I could make a grown man feel that kind of fear with nothing more than words I wrote on a piece of paper then what couldn’t I do writing literature? I’ve been trying to bust heads ever since.”
EXCERP FROM “DANGEROUS STORIES,” published in Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, edited by Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray, Ohio University Press 2015.
Let’s take a walk.
To get to the library, walking, as I did, you first come across Whetsel Damron. Now Whetsel’s since passed on, but let’s say he’s there and coming at you bowlegged from his gas pumps, tucking his wallet swelled with ones and fives into his back pocket. He’s going to smile so that his mustache lifts up into his nostrils, and the closer he gets, the more you smell the gasoline that has permanently fixed itself to his skin. He’ll jab you between the ribs with his thumb and immediately throw his hands up like John Sullivan, then pat you on the arm and laugh and return to his pumps. Whetsel keeps you on your guard. A man can never know when he’ll need to land a solid right hook. Whetsel’s good for reminding you of important things like fighting and making money. Whetsel’s interest in such things will become clearer as we go along.
Next you pass Trivette’s Trucking, once owned by Dale Trivette who has also went on from this earth but whom we’ll ask back for a time. His place is a massive brick garage with an office attached the size of most of the camp houses on High Street. Whetsel, you see, keeps a wallet big as a small mouth bass because folks mostly pay with those ones and fives, but Dale is the richest man in the world. Dale’s old man had owned coal mines and now Dale ran coal in his shortbed trucks. It’s all about connections. Mostly you don’t see Dale, though for reasons we’ll get into later. You see his drivers or mechanics—Spider, Torch, Bill Boy, Grape Ape, Wild Bill. You know them better by their call names and you yell them out and they wave at you without smiling. They’re not mean by a long stretch, unless provoked: just busy, and you’ll understand that and keep moving.
Hamilton’s Five and Dime is a sad place to pass by along the way. You’re about at the halfway point here. Mine you, it wasn’t sad then, though. That sadness would come later. As you keep on the worn path at the side of Route 461, made smooth from the kids in town walking to Virgie High School just up the way, you always, and that is always, stop here and look at the glass front door. It’s a time machine. Go through that door and to your left are canisters of candy, each with a scoop. Butterscotch, peppermint, licorice, chocolate-covered peanuts in one and chocolate-covered raisins in another. The canisters are behind the counter and you ask Mary, the lady who doesn’t own he store but who had worked there for an unknown number of years at that time and then decides afterward until its eventual closing, for a bag of this candy or that candy. She weighs it and then gives you the bag, my hand to God. But you don’t go in, standing outside with the book for return curled under your arm, and there’s no way to window- shop for peppermint candy at Hamilton’s Five and Dime. You move on.
After the high school, an unknown place to you with an expansive parking lot great for riding bike and ramp jumping, there’s a quarter of the walk with nothing but a slender path to the road where you need to watch for shortbeds blasting past. You walk this stretch thinking of the good-sized tributary of the Big Sandy River running behind the gymnasium at the high school, made perfect for taking your dogs for a swim and getting away from things. It keeps your mind off the speeding trucks two, three inches from you and your borrowed books. Besides, from here you can see the railroad tracks. And once you make it to the tracks, you’ll see the library not fifty yards away.
It’s a short piece now from the tracks, warm to the touch from two trains each day. To the left is Stanley Johnson’s old hardware store, now run by his son. Across the road is the clapboard building that is the even older Johnson’s hardware and feed store. Vesta Roberts was Stanley’s kin, and the library named in her honor is now in sight. In seconds, you’re home.
Books by Sheldon Lee Compton, available from Amazon and Cowboy Jamboree Press, Good Grit Lit
PCHS Contributor Gayle Compton
