Morgan, Author of Gap Creek and Boone, to Speak

Posted on Sept. 5, 2008

Poet, novelist and nonfiction writer Robert Morgan ’65, author of Gap Creek and Boone: A Biography, will give a free public talk on campus Oct. 2.

Morgan – a prolific writer who is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University – will receive UNC’s 2008 Thomas Wolfe Prize and deliver the annual Thomas Wolfe Lecture at 7:30 p.m. in Carroll Hall auditorium.

Ten of Morgan’s first 11 volumes – including Red Owl (W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1972), Groundwork (Gnomon Press, 1979) and At the Edge of Orchard Country (Wesleyan University Press, 1987) – were poetry collections. His work has appeared in magazines including The Atlantic Monthly and in Poetry, whose editor praised him as “one of the most original poets of his generation.”

Morgan started out as a fiction writer at Carolina, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English. He went on to earn a master’s degree in fine arts (poetry) at UNC-Greensboro. In the 1980s, Morgan returned to prose, with three collections of short fiction and five novels. His best-seller Gap Creek (Algonquin, 1999) was a selection of the Oprah Book Club.

“Robert Morgan has long been one of this country’s finest poets,” the late American Indian novelist James Welch once wrote. “Now he shows that his hand is just as steady in fiction.” A New York Times book reviewer wrote, “At their finest, his stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams’ best songs.”

Last year, Algonquin published Morgan’s Boone: A Biography, on the life of the frontiersman Daniel Boone. It won the 2007 Kentucky Literary Award for Nonfiction. He also received the latest of many prizes and honors, a 2007 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That citation read: “A storyteller with an eye for detail, an impeccable ear for language, a devotion to craft and a passion for truth … ”

Despite his national success and the fact that he has taught at Cornell since 1971, Morgan keeps his work deeply rooted in the mountains of western North Carolina, where he was born and raised. He has continued to pay close attention to that stretch of Appalachia – its landscape, history, culture and hard-working people.

“I was never interested in portraying a pastoral or simpler world, but in dramatizing the complexities of the seemingly plain, the sharpness of the everyday,” Morgan once said.

The annual lecture and prize honor Thomas Wolfe ’20, author of Look Homeward Angel. The event and prize are sponsored by Carolina’s English and comparative literature department and Morgan Writer-in-Residence Program (no relation to the speaker) and the international Thomas Wolfe Society. Ben Jones ’50 of Hendersonville endowed the medals and prize money for the award.

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Related coverage is available online:

• Brave Enemies, Cowpens and the American Revolution: Hutchins Lecture, Friday, Oct. 3, 4-5:30 p.m.
  The Hutchins Lecture is presented by the Center of the Study of the American South with support of the GAA. Morgan will discuss his work, Brave Enemies: A Novel of the American Revolution, and how historical fiction is created by using known facts and historical figures to establish a background, and sometimes foreground, within which the fictional story unfolds.
• Gap Creek Writer Gets Oprah-tisement
  From the March/April 2000 issue of the Carolina Alumni Review, available online to Carolina Alumni members.

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