Another top ten list - North Carolina's literary figures

By D. G. Martin
Posted Tuesday, May 1, 2007

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Chapel Hill, NC - What about North Carolina’s top ten authors?

Last week's column about the “top ten” books of some of our favorite writers prompted me to share another top ten list—one of North Carolina literary figures that I prepared several years ago for an article for Our State Magazine.

Here they are, in order of their dates of birth

*Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932), one of the first African-American writers to achieve widespread fame and recognition as a fiction writer, grew up in Fayetteville and later became the principal of the Fayetteville State Normal School for Negroes, now known as Fayetteville State University. In 1883, he left North Carolina for good, but his much of his work, including his best-known book, “The Conjure Woman,” is set in Fayetteville and the Cape Fear region.

*O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910) was born in Guilford County in 1862 and grew up there. But it was in New York where his compelling short stories and their surprise endings brought to him national acclaim. He is buried in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery.

*Paul Green (1894-1981) was a Harnett County native and Pulitzer Prize winner. His outdoor drama, “The Lost Colony,” may have touched more North Carolinians' lives than the work of any of our other writers.

*Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) is North Carolina's most celebrated writer. Although his first novel, “Look Homeward Angel,” did not make the lists mentioned in last week’s column, it is, as almost every North Carolinian knows, one of the finest “coming-of-age” novels ever written.

*Wilma Dykeman’s (1920-2006) first book, “The French Broad,” published in 1955, is a loving portrait of a mountain river. It established for her a lasting reputation as a chronicler of Appalachian social history.

*Reynolds Price’s (1933- ) first novel, “A Long and Happy Life,” won the William Faulkner Award, and his fiction has been winning awards ever since. He is probably the most prolific of North Carolina's nationally known writers--having written more than 30 books of essays, poetry, memoirs, and fiction, as well as the translation and interpretation of books of the Bible.

*Fred Chappell (1936- ), former poet laureate of North Carolina, is also an accomplished writer of fiction--two volumes of short stories and eight novels, showing his versatility and depth as a writer. He grew up in Canton, and much of his work is profoundly influenced by the changes in mountain, southern, and agrarian society.

*Anne Tyler (1941- ) may be North Carolina’s best-known living writer of literary fiction--if you agree that we can claim her as our own. Although she grew up in North Carolina and graduated from Duke, she has now lived most of her life in Baltimore where much of her work is set. Her best-known books are probably “The Accidental Tourist,” which became a successful and popular film, and “Breathing Lessons,” which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

*Lee Smith (1944- ) grew up and went to college in the Virginia mountains. Since 1974 she has lived in Orange County, where she has written a series of novels and books of short stories that have won an impressive set of awards and enchanted readers across the country. Her 1983 novel, Oral History, was a Book of the Month Club selection. Lee Smith answers every call to help aspiring writers and readers in our state, earning for her the affection that her new home state gives her.

*The tenth spot on the list is for you to fill. Whose name will you add? Will it be Charles Frazier, author of “Cold Mountain”? Or Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer, certainly one of the greatest living writers of stories about the South, who now lives in Chapel Hill? Or the beloved Doris Betts? Or Louis Rubin, Jill McCorkle, Kay Gibbons, Clyde Edgerton, Randall Kenan, Robert Morgan, or Allan Gurganus? Or some other one of so many more wonderful North Carolina writers?

Share your thoughts at my North Carolina Bookwatch blog (www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/), where I will also post the complete Our State article about the top ten literary figures.

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D.G. Martin is the host of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at 5:00 p.m. Check his blog and view prior programs at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/

This week’s (May 6) guest is Angela Davis Gardner, author of “Plum Wine,” a novel about a young North Carolina woman encountering Japanese culture.

Upcoming NC Bookwatch programs on UNC-TV at 5pm, Sundays:

May 6
Angela Davis Gardner
Plum Wine

May 13
Pat Taylor
Fourth Down and Goal to Go

May 20
Lee Smith
On Agate Hill

May 27
Charles Frazier
Thirteen Moons

Sunday, May 6, at 5 PM
Angela Davis-Gardner—Plum Wine: A Novel

Plum Wine Angela Davis-Gardner’s novel Plum Wine features Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wines wrapped in rice paper. Within the papers Barbara discovers writings in Japanese calligraphy that comprise a startling personal narrative. With the help of her translator, Seiji Okada, Barbara begins to unravel the mysteries of Michi's life, a story that begins in the early twentieth century and continues through World War II and its aftermath. As Barbara and Seiji translate the plum wine papers they form an intimate bond, with Michi a ghostly third in what becomes an increasingly uneasy triangle. Barbara is deeply affected by the revelation that Michi and Seiji are hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and even harder for her to understand are the devastating psychological effects wrought by war.

In this episode of North Carolina Bookwatch, author and North Carolina State University professor Angela Davis-Gardner examines the human relationships, cultural differences, and the irreparable consequences of war that runs deep in Plum Wine’s original and timeless tale.