Tour 1: Winston-Salem
Everyone in America knows this brand-name town, but the writers who have been shaped in this city tell a deeper story. Experience Moravian culture in Old Salem, learn more about the literary deacons of Wake Forest University and explore African traditions of storytelling at Winston-Salem State University.
Maybe God built Winston-Salem. It is not a blasphemous idea. In His name Moravian brothers walked down the wood from Pennsylvania to begin their skilled and Godfearing community in the wilderness. And their past is kept in Salem in the old brick and stone houses with the hooded doors and the windows made with little panes. The old trees grow green in quietness. If Winston, swollen with the wealth of cigarettes and underwear and stockings, is only across a street, sometimes it seems also across a world. It is not. There is something more than a hyphen between the two towns. There is a Moravian blood in the factories and the banks. Some of the Scotch-Irish money has helped keep the old town sweet. There is a triumph in their attachment. After living together a long time the towns were formally united in 1913, the same year the first Camel cigarette was manufactured and if it was a wedding of new-rich and old gentleness, it had been a marriage of success as well as convenience all the same.
- From Tar Heels, by Jonathan Daniels (New York: Dodd, Meade, 1941), 156.
Writers with a connection to this area: A.R. Ammons, Maya Angelou, Brad Barkley, John Henry Boner, Will D. Campbell, Martin Clark, Jonathan Daniels, Paxton Davis, Charles Edward Eaton, John Ehle, Anna Catharina Ernst, Nathan Ross Freeman, Adelaide Fries, Larry Leon Hamlin, Frank Borden Hanes, Harold Hayes, Hunter James, Norman Katkov, Helen Losse, Milt Machlin, Penelope Niven, Jacqueline Ogburn, Patrick Reynolds, Bynum Shaw, Elizabeth Spencer, Douglas C. Waller, Edwin Graves Wilson, Emily Herring Wilson and Isabel Zuber
North Carolina Arts Council Literary Fellows: Isabel Zuber (fiction writer, 2010); Vishal Khanna (fiction writer, 2006); Dennis Sampson (poet, 2002) - all of Winston- Salem.
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