Category Archives: Haywood

Haywood

Flora Ann Scearce. Singer of an Empty Day. Mount Olive, NC: Mount Olive College Press, 1997.

Born at the turn of the twentieth century, Selena “Sippy” Wright lives in North Carolina’s Great Smokies, with her parents. After a fire destroys the family’s cabin, they go to live with Sippy’s Grandmother and her youngest three children, and, while life on Utah Mountain is hard, the family struggles and survives together. Sippy’s story is filled with the work, school, and play of mountain children, but also includes details about her father’s work, her mother’s housekeeping, her grandmother’s medicinal herbs, and the events, songs, and games that were important to mountain culture. Based on the journals and recollections of the author’s mother, this novel tells the story of Sippy’s childhood from ages seven to twelve; her story is continued in Scearce’s second novel Cotton Mill Girl, published in 2006.

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Filed under 1990-1999, 1997, Docufiction, Haywood, Historical, Mountains, Novels in Series, Scearce, Flora Ann

Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Cold Mountain is the story of Inman, a deserter from the Confederate Army, and his long journey home to the mountains of North Carolina during the last year of the Civil War. The novel alternates between Inman’s struggles and those of Ada, who is at home near Cold Mountain and is able to get by only with the help of Ruby, a mountain woman unafraid to fend for herself. Cold Mountain, winner of the National Book Award in 1997, has been praised for its accuracy in portraying geographical and horticultural details, as well as the particulars of nineteenth-century life in the North Carolina mountains. The book also inspired the 2003 Oscar-winning film of the same name.

Cold Mountain won the 1997 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC Library Catalog.

Comments Off on Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Filed under 1990-1999, 1997, Frazier, Charles, Haywood, Historical, Mountains