Author: Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh is a Kansas journalist and essayist whose work examines class, gender, labor, and rural American life. Her memoir Heartland, rooted in the wheat farms and working households of her family, became a National Book Award finalist. She Come By It Natural develops related concerns through the life, songs, and public career of Dolly Parton. First issued in 2020 and later published in paperback by Scribner, Smarsh developed it from essays written for No Depression. She treats Parton not simply as a celebrity subject but as an artist whose lyrics gave language to working women often ignored by national culture. Personal memories of country music sit beside reporting on Parton’s songwriting, business decisions, screen work, and philanthropy. Smarsh later published Bone of the Bone, another essay collection. She Come By It Natural shows her characteristic movement between family experience and cultural criticism, making a portrait of Parton also an inquiry into who gets heard. Her essays keep economic structures visible without losing particular voices through which readers encounter them.