The University of North Carolina Press

440 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 83 color and 20 b&w illus., 22 maps, index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3137-3

Published: October 2007

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5833-2

Published: October 2007

Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains

A Guidebook

By Georgann Eubanks

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This guidebook is the first of three regional volumes that invite residents and out-of-state visitors to explore North Carolina while reading literature from our state's finest writers. Organized geographically through a series of eighteen half-day and day-long tours in the western part of the state, the book directs curious travelers to the historic sites where Tar Heel authors have lived and worked. Along the way, travelers can read outstanding excerpts from the writers, evoking the places, customs, colloquialisms, and characters that figure prominently in their poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and plays. More than 170 writers from the past and present are featured in this volume, including Sequoyah, Elizabeth Spencer, Fred Chappell, Charles Frazier, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Robert Morgan, William Bartram, Gail Godwin, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Lillian Jackson Braun, Nina Simone, and Romulus Linney. Each tour provides information about the libraries, museums, colleges, bookstores, and other venues open to the public where writers regularly present their work or are represented in exhibits, events, performances, and festivals.

About the Author

Georgann Eubanks is a writer, teacher, and consultant to nonprofit groups across the country. She is also a principal in the Emmy-winning documentary production firm Minnow Media. She has directed the Duke University Writers' Workshop since 1989, was a founder of the North Carolina Writers' Network, and is past chair of the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Reviews

"Takes the reader into shaded byways of fascinating obscurity or simply personal aspects of the region's writers and writing. There is a super-highway of information to be found on the gravel roads and winding tracks of North Carolina's mountains. . . . A welcome addition to the ever-lengthening shelf of worthwhile words about the state's rich literary heritage."
--North Carolina Literary Review

"'Links the lives of 170 of North Carolina's visiting and native writers with mountain region destinations."
--Carolina Country

"A unique twist to common travel guidebooks. . . . [Eubanks] makes familiar destinations new again."
--Our State

"Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains underscores the state's rich literary legacy that's ongoing, and introduces folks to writers' work they may want to further explore."
--Durham Herald-Sun

"Georgann Eubanks proves to be the perfect tour guide--knowledgeable, companionable, insightful, and often surprising. Who knew about Anne Tyler's very interesting connection to Celo, for instance? A perfect book for the armchair traveler as well as the actual tourist."
--Lee Smith

"Georgann Eubanks has not written a guidebook; she has furnished a cheerful and personable and wonderfully informed companion to take us along the literary leafy tracks and briary bypaths of the North Carolina mountains. Welcome one and all, reader and traveler, to blue-green vistas of pleasure!"
--Fred Chappell