October 5, 1932
Edward Poage McClanahan born in Brooksville.

August 5, 1934
Wendell Erdman Berry born in Henry County.

April 14, 1935
James Baker Hall born in Lexington.

July 22, 1937
Gurney Norman born in Grundy, VA.

May 1, 1940
Bobbie Ann Mason born in Mayfield. • Gurney is growing up with various relatives in Perry County.

1946
At 11, Jim takes up photography, working with a commercial photographer who has the University of Kentucky Athletics Department account.

1951
Ed starts college at Washington & Lee in Virginia.

1952
Wendell starts college at UK. • With neither his grades nor his social life as promising as he would have liked at W&L, Ed decides to transfer to Miami of Ohio.

1953
Jim starts college at UK, where he meets Wendell.

1955
Gurney starts college at UK, where Jim and Wendell are still students. • Ed graduates from Miami and makes a stab at graduate school at Stanford.

1956
Jim and Wendell room together at a summer writing program at Indiana University. • Jim edits an issue of Stylus, the UK literary magazine, that includes Gurney’s first published story. • He and Stanford having mutually agreed it wasn’t working out, Ed starts graduate school at UK. • Bobbie Ann, still in high school, is running the national fan club for the Western Kentucky singing group the Hilltoppers.

1957
Jim goes to graduate school at Stanford. • Wendell finishes his master’s at UK and takes a teaching job at Georgetown College.

1958
Bobbie Ann starts college at UK. • Wendell goes to Stanford on a Stegner Writing Fellowship. • Ed finishes his master’s at UK and heads to Oregon State College to teach.

1959
Jim is now living in Seattle, and Wendell is teaching at Stanford. • Gurney graduates from UK, where he also meets Bobbie Ann.

1960
Gurney joins Jim as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. • Wendell’s first novel, Nathan Coulter, is published, and he spends a year in Henry County farming for his father.

1962
Ed gets his own Stegner Fellowship and goes to Stanford. • Wendell moves to New York to teach at NYU. • Jim moves to Storrs, CT. • Bobbie Ann graduates from UK and moves to New York, where she works for a movie fan magazine and meets Jim and Wendell. • Gurney joins the Army and is stationed at Fort Ord, CA.

1963
Bobbie Ann enrolls in Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton. • Jim publishes a novel, Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings. • Ed begins teaching at Stanford.

1964
Gurney takes a job back home as editor of the Hazard Herald. • Wendell comes back to Kentucky and takes a teaching job at UK.

1965
Wendell moves back to Port Royal in Henry County.

1966
Having completed her master’s at SUNY, Bobbie Ann enrolls in graduate school at the University of Connecticut.

1967
Gurney moves back to California and goes to work for the Whole Earth Catalog as an editor and reviewer.

1970
On a commission from Esquire, Ed spends a year traveling with the Grateful Dead. Though Esquire doesn’t publish the piece, Playboy eventually does.

1971
Gurney’s novel Divine Right’s Trip is published in the margins of the epic last edition of the Whole Earth Catalog.

1972
Bobbie Ann completes her Ph.D. at UConn and begins teaching at Mansfield State College in Pennsylvania. • Ed returns to Lexington to teach for a year. He also gets to know local legend Little Enis, the World’s Greatest Left-Handed Upside Down Guitar Player.

1973
Ed moves to Montana to teach. • Jim has moved back to Lexington, and he and Wendell are both teaching at UK.

1974
Playboy publishes Ed’s “Little Enis Pursues His Muse.”

1975
Jim publishes a poetry collection, Getting It On Up to the Brag. • Bobbie Ann publishes an academic study entitled The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters.

1976
Ed moves to Port Royal—next door to Wendell.

1977
Gurney’s short-story collection Kinfolks is published. • Wendell leaves UK to farm and write full-time. He publishes the essay The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

1980
Gurney moves to Lexington and begins teaching at UK. • Bobbie Ann gets her first story published in The New Yorker.

1982
Bobbie Ann’s short-story collection Shiloh and Other Stories is published.

1983
About 20 years after starting it, Ed publishes his novel The Natural Man.

1985
Bobbie Ann’s first novel, In Country, is published. • Ed’s Famous People I Have Known includes both his Little Enis profile and a chapter on Bobbie Ann’s old heroes the Hilltoppers.

1987
Wendell begins teaching at UK again.

1990
Ed moves to Lexington. • Bobbie Ann moves to rural Central Kentucky.

2001
Bobbie Ann is named UK’s first Writer-In-Residence. • Jim is named Kentucky Poet Laureate. • All five writers participate in the 50th-anniversary celebration of the UK Creative Writing Program.