Robert Morgan

The story of Daniel Boone is the story of America—its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny.Bestselling, critically acclaimed author Robert Morgan reveals the complex character of a frontiersman whose heroic life was far stranger and more fascinating than the myths that surround him.This rich, authoritative biography offers a wholly new perspective on a man who has been an American icon for more than two hundred years—a hero as important to American history as his more political contemporaries George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Extensive endnotes, cultural and historical background material, and maps and illustrations underscore the scope of this distinguished and immensely entertaining work.

Young Julie Harmon works "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better.But Julie and Hank's new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it's hard to tell what to fear most—the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.A native of the North Carolina mountains, Robert Morgan was raised on land settled by his Welsh ancestors. An accomplished novelist and poet, he has won the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize, the North Carolina Award in Literature, and the Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize. His short stories have appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and New Stories from the South, and his novel The Truest Pleasure was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

One of America’s most acclaimed writers returns to the land on which he has staked a literary claim to paint an indelible portrait of a family in a time of unprecedented change. In a compelling weaving of fact and fiction, Robert Morgan introduces a family’s captivating story, set during World War II and the Great Depression. Driven by the uncertainties of the future, the family struggles to define itself against the vivid Appalachian landscape. The Road from Gap Creek explores modern American history through the lives of an ordinary family persevering through extraordinary times.

Ginny, who marries Tom at the turn of the century after her family has given up on her ever marrying, narrates THE TRUEST PLEASURE--the story of their life together on her father's farm in the western North Carolina mountains. They have a lot in common--love of the land and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Tom's father died in the war, but Ginny's father came back to western North Carolina to hold on to the farm and turn a profit. Ginny's was a childhood of relative security, Tom's one of landlessness. Truth be known--and they both know it--their marriage is mutually beneficial in purely practical terms. Tom wants land to call his own. Ginny knows she can't manage her aging father's farm by herself. But there is also mutual attraction, and indeed their "loving" is deeply gratifying. What keeps getting in the way of it, though, are their obsessions. Tom Powell's obsession is easy to understand. He's a workaholic who hoards time and money. Ginny is obsessed by Pentecostal preaching. That she loses control of her dignity, that she speaks "in tongues," that she is "saved," seem to her a blessing and to Tom a disgrace. It's not until Tom lies unconscious and at the mercy of a disease for which the mountain doctor has no cure that Ginny realizes her truest pleasure is her love for her husband. Like COLD MOUNTAIN, the time and place of THE TRUEST PLEASURE are remote from contemporary American life, but its rendering of the nature of marriage is timeless and universal. Praise for THE TRUEST PLEASURE: "Marvelously vivid imagery. . . . a quietly audacious book."--The New York Times Book Review; "Morgan deeply understands these people and their world, and he writes about them with an authority usually associated with the great novelists of the last century. . . . the book is astonishing."--The Boston Book Review;

In his latest historical novel, bestselling author Robert Morgan brings to full and vivid life the story of Jonah Williams, who, in 1850, on his eighteenth birthday, flees the South Carolina plantation on which he was born a slave. He takes with him only a few stolen coins, a knife, and the clothes on his back--no shoes, no map, no clear idea of where to head, except north, following a star that he prays will be his guide.Hiding during the day and running through the night, Jonah must elude the men sent to capture him and the bounty hunters out to claim the reward on his head. There is one person, however, who, once on his trail, never lets him fully out of Angel, herself a slave, yet with a remarkably free spirit.In Jonah, she sees her own way to freedom, and so sets out to follow him.Bristling with breathtaking adventure, Chasing the North Star is deftly grounded in historical fact yet always gripping and poignant as the story follows Jonah and Angel through the close calls and narrow escapes of a fearsome world. It is a celebration of the power of the human spirit to persevere in the face of great adversity. And it is Robert Morgan at his considerable best.

From the author of Gap Creek-an international best-seller and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award-comes the gripping story of two brothers struggling against each other and the confines of their mountain world in 1920s Appalachia.The Powell brothers-Muir and Moody-are as different as Cain and Abel. Muir is an innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother-embittered by the death of his father, by years of fighting his mother, and by his jealousy of Muir's place in the family-takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Muir escapes by wandering, making his way around the country in attempts to find something-an occupation, a calling-to match his ambition.Through it all, their mother, Ginny, tries to steer her boys right, all the while remembering her own losses: her husband (whose touch still haunts her), her youth, and the fiery sense of God that once ordered her world.When Muir, in a drunken vision, decides that his purpose in life is to clear a space on a hill and build a stone church with his own hands, the consequences of his plan are far-reaching and irrevocable: a community threatens to tear itself apart, men die, and his family is forever changed. All that's left in the aftermath are the ghosts and the memories of a new man.

Thomas Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies: the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself. Known also for his powerful fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories--and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans--form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War.

As the War for Independence wore on into the 1780s, unrest ruled the Carolinas. Settlers who had cleared the land after the Cherokees withdrew were being mustered for battle as British forces pillaged their hard-won farms. Robert Morgan's stunning novel tells a story of two people caught in the chaos raging in the wilderness.After sixteen-year-old Josie Summers murders her abusive stepfather, she runs away from home disguised as a boy. Lost in the woods, she accepts a young preacher's invitation to assist in his itinerant ministry. Eventually her identity is revealed and affection grows between the two. But when the preacher is kidnapped by British soldiers, Josie disguises herself once again and joins the militia in a desperate attempt to find him.Brave Enemies is a page-turning story of people brought together by chance and torn apart by war—a story of enduring love and of the struggle to build a homeland.

Robert Morgan's first novel skillfully weaves Appalachian oral tradition about such things as prowling panthers, outlaws, and marauding Cherokees into a "tale in three parts." The first part centers on Petal Richards, who as a young bride leaves her family to accompany her husband into the mountains in search of a new frontier. In the second part, Petal's grandson, Solomon, describes how he surveyed the best route down the mountain in preparation for building the region's first road. In the third part, Solomon's son David, tells of building the first turnpike through the wilderness.

From the bestselling author of Gap Creek, comes a breathtaking collection of stories about the lives and history of the settlers of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Struggling to survive in an ancient mountain landscape that alternately thwarts their efforts and infuses them with joy and vitality, the strong-limbed and strong-willed people of the Blue Ridge Mountains undergo the transition from ploughshares to bulldozers -- from the Indian skirmishes of the post-Revoluationary War era to the trailer parks of the present day. In these eleven first-person narratives, Morgan visits the themes that matter to all people in all places: birth and death, love and loss, joy and sorrow, the necessity for remembrance and the inevitability of forgetting. This is a moving tribute to that which is universal and eternal -- the majestic immutability of the earth and the heroic human struggle to live, love, and create new life.

From Civil War prison camps to contemporary trailer parks, these thirteen memorable tales of life in the Southern Appalachians come alive with an array of intriguing characters -- male and female, young and elderly, learned and unlearned. The separate passions and dreams of these individuals mirror the larger cultural and historical dramas of American life, revealing the strengthening and loosening of the strong bonds of families over generations.

The first full-length collection in more than a decade from the award-winning poet and author of the bestselling novel Gap Creek . Robert Morgan has won acclaim for sonorous poems rooted in his native Blue Ridge Mountains that feature taut, forceful, often haunting imagery and carefully chiseled phrases. The poems in Terroir build on his earlier work but reach out in several new directions, exploring memory, family narratives, the natural world of trees and forest animals, and the poetry of work. Readers of Morgan's fiction will recognize many places, themes, and voices, while fans of his poetry will see a fresh energy in poems drawing on science and folklore, Native American history, and music. These elegantly written poems celebrate everything from the bonds of friendship and community to the fleeting sparkle of a drop of rain, discovering wonder in the local and familiar, the sacred in the everyday.

A new collection from the awardwinning poet and author of the bestselling novel Gap CreekIn the words of Poetry magazine, Robert Morgan’s poems “shine with beauty that transcends locale.” The work in his newest collection, rooted in his native Blue Ridge Mountains, explores the mysteries and tensions of family and childhood, the splendors and hidden dramas of the natural world, and the agriculture that supports all culture. Morgan’s voice is vigorous and exact, opening doors for the reader, finding unexpected images and connections. The poems reach beyond surfaces, to the strange forces inside atoms, our genes, our heritage, and outward to the farthest movements of galaxies, the dark energy we cannot explain but recognize in our bones and blood, in our deepest memories and imagination.

Fiction. Robert Morgan has had four NEA Fellowships as well as Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. Ten powerful new stories are collected here for the first time and seven are reprinted from his two acclaimed earlier collections. Morgan has a deft touch for the nuances of family ties, and his characters in this realistic, evocative and often lyrical collection are formidable and well-drawn -- Publishers Weekly. This beautifully crafted collection ... a procession of tales rich with narrative detail and character, told in language as plain and deep as the hills, the whole weighted with an awareness of death that looms over the the struggle for a meaningful life -- New York Times Book Review.

Over 170 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe remains a figure of enduring fascination and speculation for readers, scholars, and devotees of the weird and macabre. Fallen Angel offers a new biography of this gifted, complicated author.Focusing on Poe’s personal relationships, Morgan chronicles how several women influenced his life and art. Eliza Poe, his mother, died before he turned three, but she haunted him ever after. The loss of Elmira Royster Shelton, his first and last love, devastated him and inspired much of his poetry. Morgan shows that Poe, known for his gothic and supernatural writing, was also a poet of the natural world who helped invent the detective story, science fiction, analytical criticism, and symbolist aesthetics. Though he died at age forty, Poe left behind works of great originality and vision that Fallen Angel explores.

The unfading poetic brilliance of Robert Morgan shines through these ninety-three pieces spanning thirty-five years. Celebrated for his recent fiction, Morgan makes obvious in this volume he was first, and remains foremost, a wordsmith of poetic sensibilities―a craftsman of taut, forceful imagery, alert with wonder to the mystery of what lies in plain sight.Like Robert Frost, Morgan takes the natural world as a metaphorical base for human projection. Much of his work is a love song to the Appalachian Mountain terrain and a way of life all but his father speaking in tongues; his mother canning peaches; carpentry, farming, the seasons in slow motion, family history, and wind-borne strains of music. He captures the aura around such common objects as resin, cellars, hog-wire fence, the whippoorwill, and crickets. Infusing his poetry with mountain idiom, even when pondering the cosmos beyond, Morgan creates lyrics with a rhythm like rain―“to be rocked to sleep by mountains / equals the rest of heroes.”Fourteen new poems open the volume, and selections from nine previous collections follow. Robert Morgan’s The Strange Attractor grants readers a generous overview of an important American poet’s work.

Robert Morgan’s newest collection of poetry is a treasury of snapshots in time, celebrating the past and present in Morgan’s native region of western North Carolina and the Green River Valley. Topsoil Road features two the first flowing smoothly from Cherokee history to the arrival of the poet’s Welsh forebears; the second eloquently depicting the intricacies of nature and how they are subjected to the world of man. Whether describing the Cherokee chief Attakullakulla in London or the way a zebra spider glides across the sky, Morgan casts each poem with elegance and a rare sense of wonder, turning minute observations of the commonplace into portraits of delicate and significant beauty.

Robert Morgan's most concentrated evocation of the southern Appalachian mountains in poetry. Poetry was the form for which he first received notice and it is an important basis for all the other writing that came after.

First published by Wesleyan University Press in 1987, At the Edge of the Orchard Country in back in print as a North Carolina Classic from Press 53. Dave Smith "Readers who know Robert Morgan's previous collections of poetry will be delighted by this most elegiac, most celebratory book. They will find deft and mysterious tales of country life, hymns to all matter and every manner of spirit."

In this latest collection of his poetry, award-winning author Robert Morgan continues his exploration and celebration of the culture and curiosities of his native Appalachia.

Egypt was trampled by almost every great power in the world. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Persians, Turks, French, and English. Each came with their own agenda, greed and avarice. looting and pillaging the riches of Egypt, In many instances the proud people resisted staunchly, but in many others they fell to their invaders. The Egyptians adopted Christianity early on, after the evangelist martyr Saint Mark visited the country. Christianity flowed in Egypt like the River Nile that flows through the arid dessert and rapidly transformed its people into ardent believers, saints and martyrs for the sake of their savior. This is the story of the Copt Christians of Egypt, they still inhabit the narrow Nile Valley till today, against all odds. The Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt still persist on this spot of land in spite of centuries of marginalizing, ostracizing and sanctioned persecutions. This book tells the story of the Copts of Egypt throughout the ages, the descendants of the great Pharaohs of Egypt.

Book by Morgan, Robert

Book by Morgan, Robert

This book introduces to the Norton imprint a new poet with a strong original voice. Robert Morgan writes out of the central tradition of American poetry. His lyrics, rooted though they are in the specifics of the everyday--in earth and leaves, lakes and stones--reach through and beyond these to transcendence, to mystery; they intertwine animate and inanimate, inner and outer, idea and object. As David Kalstone puts it, Morgan is "faithful to the natural facts and yet so aware of the mysterious instincts which allow us in the first place to see, hear, observe such facts."

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Appalachian author Robert Morgan delivers eight new stories about life and legends in the mountains of Western North Carolina. An alligator in in the deep woods of a state park? Ghosts? The mob? Robert Morgan takes readers into the mountains where Spanish Conquistadors once hid out, where cougars and thieves stalk their prey, and where a rock with strange markings can conjure the unexpected.

Eind 19e eeuw beleven de 17-jarige Julie en de 18-jarige Hank in Gap Creek in het onherbergzame Appalachengebergte hun eerste huwelijksjaar. Ze hebben niets, leven uiterst primitief en behalve dat ze aan elkaar moeten wennen, hebben ze de grootste moeite met het alleen al overleven. De inwonende huisbaas maakt Julie het leven zuur, er komt brand, Julie wordt zwanger, zwendelaars maken hen alles afhandig en ze verdrinken bijna bij een overstroming. Na een jaar zijn zij in materieel opzicht geen stap verder gekomen, maar wel nader tot elkaar. Morgan is hoogleraar, schreef vele dichtbundels en vier romans (ook over zijn geboortestreek de Appalachen) waarmee hij verschillende prijzen won. Hij combineert op fascinerende wijze het poetische met het alledaagse: hij geeft een ontroerende portret van het jonge echtpaar en een prachtige sfeerbeeld van de streek en de mensen, maar beschrijft ook zeer beeldend en gedetailleerd het alledaagse leven (dood van Julies broertje, het nooit ophoudende werk in en om het huis, het slachten van een varken). Goed vertaald. Een 'New York Times Notable Book' en opgenomen in 'Oprah's Book Club'.

Men of all ages have endeavored to find the meaning or purpose of life. This yearning typically comes as a man matures into manhood, a time when the parents die, children come, and eyes fail. Men typically start their quest for insight on the internet or at the local library. The internet and libraries, which are full of treatises on the subject, have become a communal refuge from what Henry David Thoreau described as lives of quiet desperation. Yet, the books therein, with the notable exception of the Bible, to me somehow all seemed empty and devoid of true enlightenment. I, like many other men, sought the answer by reading literary works ranging from the seven ages of man in Shakespeare’s As You Like It to today’s Freudian-derived pop psychology, without any success. Day after day, my search grew increasingly desperate. I felt compelled to leave behind guidance for my children. It was not until entering the solitude of prayer and personal introspection that I gained insight. My epiphany came one evening while I was looking out the kitchen window, watching snow blowing in the wind, and considering the life of a snowflake.