‘Good Cause for Living’: Environmental Justice in Virginia Hamilton’s M. C. Higgins, the Great

Abstract

This article offers an ecocritical reading of Virginia Hamilton’s celebrated novel M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974) to reposition it as a milestone of environmental writing for children. Arriving concurrently with the first Earth Day in the United States in 1970, the novel exposes the generational effects of environmental racism toward Black Americans in the steel industry and condemns the ongoing injustices of strip-mining in Appalachia. However, the novel remains neglected in the primarily white space of ecocriticism. Rereading it as a text for environmental justice recentres Hamilton’s contribution to environmental writing for children and prompts reflection amongst scholars about whose stories occupy which spaces in critical study.