Gap Creek Books In Order
- Gap Creek (1999)
- The Road from Gap Creek (2013)
Novels
- The Hinterlands (1994)
- The Truest Pleasure (1995)
- This Rock (2001)
- Brave Enemies (2003)
- Chasing the North Star (2016)
Collections
- The Blue Valleys (1989)
- The Mountains Won’t Remember Us (1992)
- The Balm of Gilead Tree (1999)
Non fiction
- Good Measure (1993)
- Boone (2007)
- Lions of the West (2011)
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Robert Morgan Books Overview
Gap Creek
There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon works hard, ‘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. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in her arms. That same year she marries and moves down into the valley where floods and fire and visions visit themselves on her, and con men and drunks and lawyers come calling. Julie and her husband discover that the modern world is complex and that it grinds ever on without pause or concern for their hard work. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Robert Morgan’s latest novel, Gap Creek, returns his readers to the vivid world of the Appalachian high country. Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley of Gap Creek 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 lives. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with their disappointments and triumphs make this a riveting follow up to Morgan’s acclaimed novel, The Truest Pleasure.
The Hinterlands
Robert Morgan’s first novel unfolds through the voices of three generations of Appalachian storytellers. In the first segment, adventurous teenager Petal runs off with a handsome homesteader in 1772. She tells of setting up housekeeping on the frontier, including the story of birthing her first baby while staving off a panther. In 1816, Petal’s grandson uses a starved pig to track the best route for building a route down the mountain to market. In 1845, Petal’s grandson constructs the turnpike down the mountain.
The Truest Pleasure
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 ho*ards 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;
This Rock
Jessica Ronky Haddad Style Weekly Transports readers directly to the wild and forgotten mountains of North Carolina and to the secret, hopeful places in a young man’s heart. From the author of Gap Creek the international bestseller and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction comes the gripping story of two brothers struggling against each other and the confines of their 1920s Appalachian Mountain world. Muir and Moody Powell are as different as Jacob and Esau. Muir is an innocent, shy young man with big dreams and not the slightest idea of what to do about them. Moody, the older, wilder brother, takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Through it all, their mother, Ginny, tries to steer them right, while dealing with her own losses: her husband, her youth, and the fiery sense of God that had once ordered her world. When Muir discovers his purpose in life, the consequences are far reaching and irrevocable: a community threatens to tear itself apart and his family is forever changed. This Rock is the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet from an author whose sentences at their finest…
burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams s best songs The New York Times Book Review. Homespun pleasure. Nelson Taylor, Providence Journal Hell bent and excellent…
I can t shake the first scene…
. resonant…
moving. Katherine Whittemore, The New York Times Book Review Morgan s prose is sharp and saturated with details…
imbued…
with a sort of lyrical sheen…
both moving and spiritual. Michael Paulson, Bookpage Robert Morgan, the author of the award winning novel Gap Creek, is a native of the North Carolina mountains, where he was raised on land settled by his Welsh ancestors.
Brave Enemies
In the 1780s, unrest ruled the Carolinas. Settlers were arriving to clear forest glades and ridges as the Cherokees withdrew; British forces were pillaging as the patriots mustered for battle. Robert Morgan’s stunning new novel tells a story of two young people caught in the chaos and war raging in the wilderness. Only sixteen years old, Josie Summers murders her abusive stepfather and, wearing his clothes to disguise herself as a man, flees the family farm. Almost immediately lost in the snowy woods, she accepts a young Methodist preacher’s invitation to assist in his itinerant ministry. When Joseph’s true identity is revealed, the Reverend John Trethman is racked with guilt at having shared his home with a young woman and then falling in love with her. His solution is to marry Josie, performing as both minister and bridegroom. Not long after their wedding, John is kidnapped by British soldiers and forced to minister to their wounded and bury their dead. Josie again disguises herself as a man and joins the North Carolina militia to avoid being taken for a spy. On January 17, 1781, in a wooded pasture called the Cowpens, Josie is gravely wounded in the patriots’ victorious battle and despairs of ever seeing John again. Robert Morgan’s description of the battle of Cowpens is as vivid and intense as any in Revolutionary War literature. Brave Enemies is a story of romance and enduring love, of the struggle to build a homeland as one era is dying and another age of freedom and discovery is being born.
The Blue Valleys
The Blue Valleys is a remarkable debut collection of stories from award winning poet Robert Morgan. These thirteen memorable tales of Southern Appalachians evoke with crystal clarity the natural world of this rural environment. From Civil War prison camps to contemporary trailer parks, these lyrical stories come alive with an array of intriguing character 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. And Morgan’s meticulous eye for detail creates an indelible sense of place in reader both familiar with and strangers to the Blue Ridge Mountains, who will feel the inescapable lure of the region that is Morgans’s birthright. Opening with the powerful prize winning ‘A Brightness New and Welcoming,’ about Confederate soldier in a Chicago prison camp, the collection then charts a course through the changing landscape of the North Carolina mountains through world wars, Vietnam, and its aftermath revealing the strengthening and loosening of the strong bonds of Southern families over generations.
The Mountains Won’t Remember Us
In this breathtaking collection of stories, celebrated author and poet Robert Morgan portrays the lives and history of a strong limbed, strong willed people: the settlers of the Blue Ridge Mountains and their descendants. Struggling to survive in an ancient mountain landscape that alternately thwarts their efforts and infuses them with joy and vitality, Morgan’s people undergo the transition from the Indian skirmishesof the post Revolutionary War era to the trailer parks of the present day. With one eyo on the land itself and the other on its inhabitants, Morgan poignantly portrays a history of change, of transformation in the landscape, in humanity’s relationship to the earth, and in people’s relationships with each other. His intimate knowledge of the region he portrays makes this collection a valuable social history. At the same time, Morgan offers a moving theme 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. Focusing on one people in one place, Morgan addresses 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.
The Balm of Gilead Tree
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.
Boone
This commanding biography from New York Times bestselling author Robert Morgan transforms a mythic American hero a legend in his own time into a flesh and blood man. Morgan’s sweeping biography of Daniel Boone is the story of America its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny. It is the most comprehensive book ever written about the man who was the largest spirit of his time. Hunter, explorer, settler, he was a trailblazer and a revolutionary an American icon for more than two hundred years. Born in 1734, Boone participated in the colonization of North America, the settling of the Middle Plain, the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War, the election of his friend as the first president of the United States, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Westward Expansion. Unlike others of his time, he had a reverence for the Indians, who taught him how to hunt, navigate, and survive in the impenetrable wilderness. He accomplished feat after impossible feat yet was also accused of treason, fraud, hypocrisy; was court martialed; and was sued for debt again and again. By the end of his life, most of his land claims had been lost to lawyers, politicians, and better businessmen than he. Extensive endnotes, fascinating cultural and historical background material, maps, illustrations, and an index underscore the scope of this distinguished and immensely entertaining work by a writer who, like novelist turned historian Shelby Foote, has the talent and the knowledge to make this legendary American come vividly to life.
Lions of the West
From Thomas Jefferson’s birth in 1743 to the California Gold rush in 1849, America s Manifest destiny comes to life in Robert Morgan s skilled hands. 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. With illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, appendixes, notes, and time lines, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of America as compelling as a grand novel.
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