Literary Trails of North Carolina

Everywhere you turn in North Carolina there are amazing stories. There is something particularly rich in the sound of stories as they are told by Tar Heels—the cadence and the color, the shoulder-to-shoulder intimacy of tragedy and humor—all offered in accents and syntax as variable as the geography of this 600-mile-wide landscape.

North Carolina is still predominantly a state of small towns, mostly rural, with people profoundly connected to the land and rooted in a long genealogy of stubborn, self-reliant, and resilient families—Native American, African American, and European American. More recently, the state has added the voices of peoples with Hispanic and Asian backgrounds.

North Carolina’s many Indian tribes (more Native Americans live here than in any state east of the Mississippi) are the oldest practitioners of narrative. Then, with the arrival of Europeans came the abiding mystery of the Lost Colony—North Carolina’s first English settlement, which disappeared from the coast after John White’s departure from Roanoke Island in August 1587, thereby setting another long-told tale in motion. This story eventually led, in the 20^th century, to the invention of an art form—the outdoor drama, a theatrical genre offered here first and now all across the nation as a tourist attraction and lively history lesson.

For a state so rich in tale and tradition, it’s unsurprising that North Carolina’s native and visiting writers through the years have been a talented lot, and the western mountains of the state have seen their share. Ernest Hemingway stayed here during a hunting trip. Carl Sandburg’s Flat Rock home remains as he left it four decades ago. Asheville’s Grove Park Inn was frequented by F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. O. Henry wrote several of his trademark short stories in our state. Thomas Wolfe’s angel looks homeward still from a cemetery in Hendersonville. Gilded Age novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton compared notes on their separate visits to Asheville’s Biltmore House. Sequoyah invented the first Native American alphabet here, transforming the Cherokee to written as well as oral communicators. Wilma Dykeman’s 1966 novel, The Tall Woman, foreshadowed Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain as a story of post–Civil War women and their hardscrabble strength and will to survive.

A range of writers over the decades, including Manly Wade Wellman, Sharyn McCrumb, and Perry Deane Young, took up the dark story of mountain bride Frankie Silver, who murdered her drunken husband. Contemporary writers of psychological thrillers and mysteries who have lived here include Lillian Jackson Braun, Kay Hooper, Toni L.P. Kelner, Manly Wade Wellman, Phyllis A. Whitney and Mart Baldwin.

Jan Karon made the High Country vivid with her “Mitford” novels, in which an Episcopal priest and his parishioners and neighbors in a town much like Blowing Rock lead lives of quiet fascination. In a series of books that began with I Am One of You Forever, Fred Chappell sets his picaresque tales centering on the young Jess Kirkman and his family in the territory southwest of Asheville, where Mr. Chappell himself was raised.

Although he never visited our state from his native France, science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote an entire novel, Master of the World, inspired by the mysterious “Brown Mountain Lights” of the Pisgah National Forest. Later, fantasy and science fiction writers like Dale Bailey and George Fawcett found inspiration here.

The North Carolina mountains also have been home to distinguished poets like Fred Chappell, Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Grace DiSanto, Isabel Zuber, Jim Wayne Miller, Ron Rash, Joseph Bathanti, John Foster West, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Lynn Santy Tanner, Michael McFee, and current North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer.

It was in North Carolina that playwright and actor William Gillette cooked up the quirky characterization and iconic props for his stage adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Other playwrights, past and present, include Hatcher Hughes,
Olive Tilford Dargan, Perry Deane Young and John Crutchfield.

Louis B. Rubin, Jr., in his article “On the New North Carolina Writers,” observed: “Good writers—like grapes and overdrafts at the bank—usually come in bunches. When there is one, there are likely to be others turning up about the place” (Frank: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing & Art, 2004). There are good writers in abundance in this state, giving us all much to savor.