The Spring Literary Festival at Western Carolina University will take place this year from March 26-29 and will feature readings from Charles Baxter, Gish Jen, and many other authors. This only confirms my earlier claim that North Carolina has an embarrassment of riches these days when it comes to literary gatherings. Scarcely a month seems to pass without another big event like this taking place somewhere in the state.
Category: Literature
Zelda Fitzgerald in North Carolina
The March This Month in North Carolina History feature looks at the tragic death of Zelda Fitzgerald in Asheville, N.C. in 1948. Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald spent time on and off in Asheville during the latter years of their lives.
There are at least a couple of Zelda Fitzgerald items in the North Carolina Collection. The NCC Gallery has one of her watercolors, done while she was a patient at the Highland Hospital, and there is a letter of condolence from her to Louise Perkins following the death of Maxwell Perkins in the summer of 1947. This letter (the signature is shown here) is in the Aldo Magi Collection of Thomas Wolfe materials.
George Moses Horton
Yesterday the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill renamed one of its new student dormitories after George Moses Horton, a slave from Chatham County. It is thought to be the first building on a Southern college campus to be named for a former slave.
Horton became the first African American to publish a book in the South when a collection of his poems, The Hope of Liberty, was published in 1829. A later collection, The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, The Colored Bard of North Carolina (1845), included a short biographical introduction in which the author described his beginnings as a poet:
Having got in the way of carrying fruit to the college at Chapel Hill on the Sabbath, the collegians who, for their diversion, were fond of pranking with the country servants who resorted there for the same purpose that I did, began also to prank with me. But somehow or other they discovered a spark of genius in me, either by discourse or other means, which excited their curiosity, and they often eagerly insisted on me to spout, as they called it . . . Hence I abandoned my foolish harangues, and began to speak of poetry, which lifted these still higher on the wing of astonishment; all eyes were on me, and all ears were open. Many were at first incredulous; but the experiment of acrostics established it as an incontestable fact. Hence my fame soon circulated like a stream throughout the college. Many of these acrostics I composed at the handle of the plough, and retained them in my head, (being unable to write,) until an opportunity offered, when I dictated, whilst one of the gentlemen would serve as my emanuensis. I have composed love pieces in verse for courtiers from all parts of the state, and acrostics on the names of many of the tip top belles of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia.
Both of these volumes have been digitized by Documenting the American South.
The renaming of the dormitory is part of a recent resurgence of scholarly and popular interest in Horton. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 1996, an authoritative biography by Joan R. Sherman was published by UNC Press in 1997, he was featured in the UNC Manuscripts Department’s exhibit “Slavery and the Making of the University,” and the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program has just placed a marker honoring Horton.
Horton did not see this kind of recognition or appreciation during his lifetime. Even after publishing two volumes of poetry he was not freed from slavery until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Horton left North Carolina in 1865, following a Michigan regiment north. He later settled in Philadelphia. It is not known how or when he died.
Wolfe in the Library of America
Just when it looks like Thomas Wolfe is about to drop out of the canon, he pops back up again. As the holder of the largest published collection of works by and about Wolfe, the North Carolina Collection keeps an eye on all things Wolfean and we were excited to learn that the Asheville native’s works would soon be published by the Library of America. The latest Library of America e-Newsletter reports that in a reader survey asking what authors currently missing from the series should be included, Wolfe was among the top twenty mentioned, along with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both fellow Scribner’s authors and proteges of Maxwell Perkins. There is no word yet on when the Wolfe volumes will appear.
Harry Potter in Asheville
All loyal readers of the Harry Potter books know that when the young wizard boards the train at platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Railway Station, he is whisked away to . . . western North Carolina?
In Thomas Wolfe’s book The Hills Beyond, first published in 1941, there is a short story entitled “The Plumed Knight” about a young man named Theodore Joyner who operated a school a couple a miles from Libya Hill, a fictional version of Wolfe’s hometown of Asheville. Wolfe writes,
The eminence on which the new school stood had always been known as Hogwart Heights. Theodore did not like the inelegant sound of that, so he rechristened it Joyner Heights, and the school, as befitted its new grandeur, was now named “The Joyner Heights Academy.” The people in the town, however, just went on calling the hill Hogwart as they had always done, and to Theodore’s intense chagrin they even dubbed the academy Hogwart, too.
I found the reference to this coincidental naming in a recent review of the collection Thomas Wolfe’s Civil War (University of Alabama Press, 2004).
Poetry from the Big Rigs
If you’re looking to start a book collection, but are having trouble finding the right niche to specialize in, I’ve got just the thing: trucker poetry. I stumbled across what appears to be the North Carolina Collection’s sole title in this genre, Rotha Dawkins’s Driving ‘N Dreaming (Your Treasure Publications, 2001). Dawkins is the author of the popular trucker romances Red High Heels and Red High Heels II.
I checked WorldCat to see if anything else would show up under the subject heading “Truckers — Poetry,” and sure enough, there were four more titles: Trucker’s Life, by Daren Flynn (Vantage Press, 1997); Driver: Sixteen Gears and Lonely, by Joe Walsh (Violin Roads Press, 1987); Soft Slow Motion by Dixie Schnell (Turnaround, 2001; and The Road Leads North: A Collection of Poems of the North Country Through an Alaskan Trucker’s Eyes, by Robert D. Birt (R.D. Birt, 1989). With all that time on the open road to contemplate and compose, it’s no wonder that some of these folks are starting to commit their thoughts to verse.
Trees Grow in Chapel Hill, Too
I found this bookplate in one of the North Carolina Collection’s copies of Hugh Lefler’s Orange County, 1752-1952 (Orange Printshop, 1953). Apparently the book belonged at one time to the library of the best-selling author to have come from Chapel Hill.
Betty Smith came to Chapel Hill in the 1930s to work with the Federal Theater. She was a prolific playwright while here, publishing many one-act plays and often working with Frederick Koch and the Carolina Playmakers. In the 1940s, Smith wrote a novel based on her childhood in Brooklyn. Published in 1943, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was an instant and enduring success, ultimately selling over six million copies.
New Edition of Wolfe Classic
Scribner’s has recently published a new edition of Thomas Wolfe’s classic coming-of-age novel, Look Homeward, Angel. This edition includes nice appreciations of the book by two contemporary novelists of the North Carolina mountains, Charles Frazier and Robert Morgan.
Thirteen Moons in Cherokee
Sunday’s Raleigh News and Observer reported the interesting news that a section of Charles Frazier’s new novel, Thirteen Moons, will be translated into Cherokee. Apparently, it will be the first novel ever to be published in that language.
The majority of publications in the Cherokee language appeared in the 1840s and 1850s, many the work of the Mission Press in Park Hill, Oklahoma. These were primarily translations of the Bible, religious tracts, and hymnbooks. After the Civil War there were some legal materials published in Cherokee, including a set of the laws of the Cherokee Nation, but publications in the native language dwindled until a resurgence of interest in Cherokee in the late twentieth century.
Many of the more recent publications in Cherokee have focused on language instruction, with some clearly aimed at younger readers: in 1975 the comic strips “Blondie” and “Beetle Bailey” appeared in booklets in the Cherokee language. The University of North Carolina library holds several recent Cherokee language instruction books, including “How to Talk Trash in Cherokee” (Downhome Publications, 1989).
Perhaps with this continued interest in the language, combined with the inspiration and example of Frazier’s novel, it won’t be long before we see a novel composed in Cherokee.
N.C. Novels for the Fall
This is a great season for reading North Carolina literature, with new novels by some of the state’s most respected writers coming out within a few weeks of each other. Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill, set in Civil War era Hillsborough, has just been released and Doug Marlette’s Magic Time comes out this week. Follow the links from each title for recent reviews in the Charlotte Observer.
These two books should keep anxious readers busy until October 3, when Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier’s long-awaited second novel is released. Raleigh News & Observer columnist J. Peder Zane has already declared it a “worthy successor” to Cold Mountain.