James Larkin Pearson

Year Inducted: 2014

James Larkin Pearson was born on September 13, 1879, in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County. He was born in a log cabin on his parent's farm. According to Pearson in his book My Fingers and My Toes, his first attempt at poetry came when he was about four years old: "One cold winter day my father had me out with him and asked me, "Jimmy are you cold?" Without taking any time to study out my answer, it came like a flash: "My fingers and my toes, my feet and my hands, are just as cold, as you'd ever see a man's." From this point, Larkin wrote, he wanted to be a poet. He was a poor student in school and wrote that he "was set down as a hopeless case...quit school entirely at 16, having never been in school more than 12 months, from first to last." However, he continued to educate himself: "I always carried my notebook and my pencil with me, and as I trudged between the plow-handles in the hot sunshine, my mind was busy working out a poem."

On August 4, 1953, North Carolina Governor Umstead appointed Pearson as North Carolina's second Poet Laureate, and he served from 1953 until 1981. He kept this title until his death. His functions as poet laureate included reading poems at the inaugural ceremonies and promoting interest in poetry at schools, colleges and universities.

In addition to My Fingers and My Toes, some of Pearson's many books of poetry are Fifty Acres and Other Selected Poems, Plowed Ground and Early Harvest. Pearson's poetry often focused upon farming and other aspects of rural life and country living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For most of his adult life Pearson lived on his farm called "Fifty Acres" in Boomer, North Carolina. Pearson died on August 27, 1981, at the age of 101.