Demon Copperhead was published by HarperCollins in 2022 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. It is Kingsolver’s most acclaimed novel since The Poisonwood Bible and her most commercially successful.
Damon Fields — “Demon Copperhead” for his red hair — is born in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, to a single mother struggling with addiction. Kingsolver maps Dickens’s David Copperfield onto contemporary Appalachia: the cruel stepfather (Murdstone becomes a meth dealer), the exploitative child labor (Demon is worked to exhaustion by foster families), the Betsey Trotwood figure (a tough mountain woman who eventually provides refuge), and the crisis that nearly destroys the hero (David’s breakdown becomes Demon’s opioid addiction).
The novel is narrated entirely in Demon’s voice — first-person, present-tense, with the cadences and vocabulary of southern Appalachian speech. Kingsolver researched the opioid epidemic extensively, particularly the role of Purdue Pharma in marketing OxyContin to rural communities whose economies had already been devastated by the decline of coal and tobacco.
Collecting Demon Copperhead
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2022): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first: $100–$250