When I Was Young in the Mountains

Cynthia Rylant published When I Was Young in the Mountains in 1982, with pictures by Diane Goode. It reached the shortlist for a National Book Award in the children's books category the following year, the pictures won a Caldecott Honor, and Horn Book Fanfare included it among its best books of 1982.

It is a short book, told in the voice of a child remembering her youth in the mountains of West Virginia, and it works by accumulating small scenes of family life rather than by telling a story with a plot. Rylant drew on her own childhood: she was born in Hopewell, West Virginia in 1954, and after her parents divorced she was brought up largely by her grandparents in Cool Ridge, with the mountains and a large circle of relatives around her.

Her father's love of storytelling was one of the things she carried over into her own work. The book has stayed in print as one of the standard picture books about Appalachian family life, and it was followed by other stories for children set in the same part of the country.