'I lost my accent because I got tired of being ridiculed,' Kingsolver says.

People made fun of her Appalachian accent, and strangers accosted her on campus demanding she speak in her mountain drawl. Growing up, Kingsolver was familiar with the depictions of this social class popularised by the 60s sitcom Beverly Hillbillies: 'Ignorant idiots who hold our jeans up with a rope and have a pig in the house for a pet and shoot the neighbour's lights out if they're bothering us,' as she explained on ABC RN's The Book Show.īut Kingsolver and her friends never took these 'far-fetched' caricatures seriously so when she moved to Indiana to accept a scholarship to study music at DePauw University, she was surprised to discover her classmates took the Beverly Hillbillies stereotypes at face value. The bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible was raised in Nicholas County, Kentucky, in the Appalachian region of the United States, home to a largely white and disproportionately poor population often derided by outsiders as hillbillies - or, in the words of Demon Copperhead, the titular young protagonist of Kingsolver's latest novel: 'Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks.

Barbara Kingsolver didn't realise the world thought she was a hillbilly until she left home to go to university.

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