Edgar Tolson was born in Wolfe County, eastern Kentucky, deep in the Appalachian heartland. Woodcarving, a by-product of the skills needed to survive in a region known as much for its grinding poverty as for its great natural beauty, came to the artist naturally. When asked how he began to carve, Tolson once recalled, "I never even thought about carving. . . . I was just whittling, that was all, but I always wanted to make something, you see. And I'd get out and make sleds when I was a small boy and carve out a locomotive train or something, you know, whittle it out and set it up."

Growing up in a family of subsistence farmers, Tolson worked at a variety of jobs during the course of his life; in addition to farming, he occasionally was employed in local coal mines or sawmills. He was a carpenter, blacksmith, and construction worker. During the Great Depression, when supplementary work was scarce, he is reported to have made chairs to sell on the streets of a neighboring hamlet. Following in the footsteps of his fundamentalist father, James Perry Tolson, the artist also served as a lay preacher, but his life was marked by physical infirmity, alcoholism, depression, and even a term in prison for abandonment of his first wife.

Tolson began woodcarving in earnest following a stroke in 1957. Although his repertoire was varied, he is best known for a series of sequential narrative carvings depicting the Fall of Man, as described in chapter 3 of the book of Genesis. One of the most frequently quoted chapters of the Bible among evangelical Christians, Genesis tells the story of the temptation of Eve, the loss of innocence, the entry into the world of sin and suffering, and hence—according to the Christian understanding—the need for the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In approaching this theme, Tolson was fully aware both of the centrality of its theological message and its vivid theatricality. Here the artist depicts Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden. Only the serpent, hovering sinuously in the tree, is painted, heightening the drama of the narrative. The angel, raised above the other figures, is one of the cherubim, who, along with a flaming sword, were placed by God at the east of Eden at the time of the expulsion (Gen. 3:24).

Tolson used a pocketknife to carve his stylized figures from poplar. They are uniformly spare in appearance, typically with little application of paint. Their strong iconic presence derives from the simplicity of their carved forms and their impassivity of mood. Frozen in time even as they play out their roles in the sacred drama, they appear detached and stoical. This is no less true when the artist, who often employed a wry sense of irony in his work, introduced explicit sexuality into his compositions.

Tolson received widespread recognition for his artwork during his lifetime. His carvings were included in the 1973 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art at least in part because their "formal simplicity" and "peculiar austerity" were thought to render them "modernist in spirit."

Gerard C. Wertkin, "Expulsion," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 380.