Throughout his entire career, American novelist John Fox Jr. was dedicated to documenting the complexities of the culture in his native South. However, in his later works, Fox Jr. began to take a broader view, including some of the external influences that helped to shape Southern life, as elements of his fiction. In The Heart of the Hills, the final volume of Fox Jr.'s acclaimed Mountain Trilogy (following The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine), Fox Jr. explores the way that outside players exploited the impoverished people of the South and the region's abundant natural resources for their own selfish gain.