Rena Gazaway, circa 1968

Rena Gazaway was a public-health professional and anthropologist who in the 1960s lived for two years among families in an isolated Appalachian hollow in eastern Kentucky and documented their daily lives and struggles in her landmark book The Longest Mile: The Forgotten People of an Appalachian Hollow (1969). (Google Books) In that deeply immersive fieldwork, she adopted the locals’ dialect and daily routines, providing a compassionate and unflinching portrait of poverty, welfare dependence, ill-health, and cultural isolation in the mountain region. (Kirkus Reviews) Her work remains a notable example of outsider ethnography in Appalachia, blending public-health insight, anthropological observation, and social critique, though her precise biographical details beyond that major book (such as birth/death dates, academic positions, or further writings) appear to be less well documented in readily available sources. (Written with AI assistance, 2025)