Posted on September 2, 2000 - by Ralph Grizzle

Literary Southern Appalachia

“When I went off to college,” says Charles Frazier, author of the blockbuster bestseller Cold Mountain, “I came back to the mountains of North Carolina to work during the summers. There was this old guy there who had heard I’d gone down to the flatlands to go to school. He said he never felt good down there: ‘Like I’m riding in the bed of a flatbed truck with no sideboards,’ he told me. That always seemed about right to me.”

Charles Kuralt, the CBS reporter and wordsmith well known for his “On the Road” homages to all things homespun, had similar sentiments. “I’ve always felt at home in the mountains,” he wrote in Charles Kuralt’s America. “I don’t know why. I was born in Wilmington, on the flat coast … and brought up in the rolling Piedmont, near Charlotte, which passed at the time for a big city. I get no particular tingle from either place. I feel embraced by the mountains.”

The comfort of that embrace may in part explain the success of novels such as Frazier’s National Book Award-winning Cold Mountain, Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek, currently climbing the bestseller list, award-winning poet and novelist Fred Chappell’s Look Back All The Green Valley, and other recently popular works set amidst the highest mountains in the Eastern United States. In many parts of the Southern Appalachians — once justly called “the land that time forgot” but now suddenly the literary rage of the bestseller lists ““ you do indeed feel embraced, as if Mother Nature were cradling you, protecting you from all that is “out there” — a world caught in an all-consuming spiral of urgency hurtling toward a frenetic future.

Only a handful of years ago, the region seemed suspended in time. Civilization pressed forward through the gaps and around these high mountains — the United States first frontier. A sparse settling of Scotch-Irish mountaineers remained strong in their support of American Independence, weak in their allegiance to the Confederacy. They displayed a rich culture of crafts and music, a pioneering independence long after the west was settled, a lilting, colorful speech and skepticism toward “outlanders” and their “outlandish” ways. The 1972 film “Deliverance” perpetuated the perception of a dark, backward, but immensely beautiful, land.

Before the early 1900s, the outside world scarcely knew of the Southern Appalachians — even though George W. Vanderbilt had already opened his 250-room mansion Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina — still the country’s largest private home, and E.W. Grove, a Tennessee pharmacist who made his fortune on Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, was preparing to open what newspapers would hail as the “finest resort hotel in the world,” Asheville’s Grove Park Inn.

Tourism would only grow, but while preparing for his trip to the Southern highlands in 1904, Horace Kephart, a professional librarian, could find nothing about the region. He searched the public libraries but failed to find even a magazine article that described the land and its people. “Had I been going to Tenerife or Timbuktu, the libraries would have furnished information aplenty,” Kephart wrote in Our Southern Highlanders, an account of his coming to live in the Southern Appalachians. “But about this housetop of eastern America they were strangely silent. It was terra incognita.”

The opening of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934, which Kephart helped establish; the Appalachian Trail, which became a continuous footpath from Maine to Georgia in 1937; the Blue Ridge Parkway, which welcomed its first visitor in 1939; all served to open the Southern Appalachians to outsiders.

But even as the masses were discovering the Southern Appalachians, the region remained in literary obscurity, with few exceptions, of course: the notable one being Asheville resident Thomas Wolfe, born 100 years ago in October, and the author of Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. Writers struggled to bring visibility to the area, but few enjoyed great commercial success. Other writers visited — F. Scott Fitzgerald summered at the Grove Park Inn (a bullet lodged in the ceiling of the guestroom where he stayed marks the failing writer’s botched suicide attempt), and Carl Sandburg settled in Flatrock during the last years of his life. But “five years ago a New York editor told me that you couldn’t sell Appalachian fiction,” says Robert Morgan, a Cornell University English professor who has been called the poet laureate of Appalachia [Ed. Note: by Kirkus Reviews]. “Then along came Cold Mountain.”

For his part, Frazier had doubts that Cold Mountain would sell. He told his wife there might be a few thousand people who might be interested in reading the book he wrote during nearly eight years in seclusion. But once out of the starting gate, Cold Mountain sprinted past other bestsellers and has since sold 3.5 million copies — not just in the United States, but worldwide.

Frazier says he believes the success of Cold Mountain and other books set in Southern Appalachia is grounded in a “desire to look back.” The more people become pressed by modernity, the more they long for a “sense of continuity,” he believes, something to fix them in this ever-changing world. “We’re such an unrooted culture these days that a book about home, about place, about being rooted and what that means and the kind of reimbursements you get from knowing a place real well and belonging there, that kind of book connects with people,” Frazier says.

Though the region has only recently emerged from literary dimness, Southern Appalachia has always had fine writers, Wolfe, among them. Asheville’s Wilma Dykeman has been writing about life in this region since the authors of the now-popular books were young men. Two of Dykeman’s books, The French Broad, first published in 1955, and The Tall Woman, published in 1962, are still being snapped up by readers. But had the mother of Southern Appalachian literature written her books 40 years later, they may have topped the best-seller lists.

“To be from Southern Appalachia was a hindrance when I was writing my books,” Dykeman says. “You weren’t literate and certainly you didn’t write. Southern Appalachian literature was always perceived as being only regional and never universal. But now readers have come to realize that the place is unique and the people here and their experiences are universal.”

“We’ve always had good writers coming out of the mountains,” says Lee Smith, who has written books set in Southern Appalachia for the past two decades. “But only a few have found success in the outer world.”

Which raises the question, Is part of the success of Cold Mountain and other recent Southern Appalachian books due to the increased visibility provided by such forces as Oprah and Amazon.com? Frazier thinks “it may partly just be a matter of visibility.”

Visibility is surely coming to the Southern Appalachians. The Great Smoky Mountains, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park, are today the nation’s most popular national parks. Add cool summers and snowy winters, and there’s little doubt why the Southern Appalachians continue to attract global travelers as never before. Cities like Asheville, which tops many “best places to live” lists, enjoy a thin veneer of cosmopolitan sophistication, which explains why an increasing number of outsiders are moving to the green valleys. Thus the old stereotypes are harder to come by. Venture off the beaten path in the mountains and you’re just as likely to bump into Florida retirees as hillbillies.

But the Appalachians of myth — though vanishing — can still be found just a few ridges over from the big mountain towns.

Frazier, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, vows to return to live in the mountains soon. Morgan will return this fall to his native North Carolina from New York to teach at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Like those who visit or settle here, Frazier and Morgan come because the Appalachian Mountains remain a place with a there still there. They come because they feel as if they are coming home.

But there is only so much you can do to describe the place that is the Southern Appalachians. You can sweep your eyes over it from the Blue Ridge Parkway and wander deep into its intimate fastnesses — but there is mystery still there, a timelessness of landscape and depth of culture that’s harder to put ones finger on. Here are three acclaimed writers, and three works crafted for Hemispheres, that do just that.

AUTHOR BIO: In Asheville, North Carolina, Ralph Grizzle is the author of a new book and companion web site honoring Charles Kuralt.

“Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain, and the mountain will keep it, folded.” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek