Month: May 2025

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Authors who live in your state: I’ve revised it a bit to include any authors who have lived in my state. They don’t have to be there now, and they don’t have to be alive. I’m living in North Carolina now, and won’t move again, so I’m focusing on authors who have lived in North Carolina. Many of them live or have lived in Western NC, where I now live and where my mother was born and raised.

Here’s a beautiful mountain view in Western NC:

Credit to AmazingAsheville.net for some of the information in the following list.

1. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was born in Asheville at 92 Woodfin Street. His father carved gravestones, and his mother ran a boarding house at 48 Spruce Street, where Wolfe lived until he went to Chapel Hill to attend the University of North Carolina. After finishing at Chapel Hill in 1920, he went to Harvard to study playwriting. Wolfe’s first and arguably best novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is autobiographical. Eugene Gant is Wolfe, and scores of the many characters in the novel are thinly disguised real people in Asheville, which in the novel is called Altamont. Later Wolfe called Asheville Libya Hill. Many in Asheville took issue with the book and its author, and Wolfe did not return to Asheville until near his death at age 37. Of the town’s reaction to Wolfe’s first book, Wilma Dykeman wrote, “With the usual perverseness of humanity, the people of Asheville did not seem shocked at much of the deceit and folly and wickedness and waste that Wolfe found – they were shocked only that he exposed it.”
2. Horace Kephart: Horace Kephart (1862-1931) is best known for Our Southern Highlanders, his 1913 study of mountain people in Western North Carolina.. Born in Pennsylvania, he came to Western North Carolina in 1904 and lived in Hazel Creek, Bryson City,and Dillsboro. He was instrumental in establishing the national park in the Smokies and in creating the route for the Appalachian Trail.
3. Charles Frazier (1950 – Present) Frazier was born in Asheville. Possibly his most successful book was Cold Mountain, which won the National Book Award and was made into a movie in 2003. Thirteen Moons (2006), also set in Western North Carolina, traces the story of a white man’s involvement with the Cherokee Indians in the early 19th century.
4. Jan Karon (1937-), born in Lenoir, retired from advertising and began writing when living in Blowing Rock, the setting (as the mountain town of Mitford) of the successful Mitford series, which began with 1994’s At Home in Mitford. Karon now lives on a farm in Virginia.
5. Caroline Miller (1903-1992), a Georgia native, lived for several years in Waynesville, NC. Her 1933 novel, Lamb in His Bosom, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
6. Billy Graham (1918-2018), world-renowned Christian evangelist, whose home was in Montreat, published more than 30 books on religion, salvation, and relationship with God.
7. His wife, Ruth Bell Graham (1920-2007), was author or co-author of 14 books, including volumes of poetry and personal recollections.
8. Nicholas Sparks (1965 – Present) lives in New Bern, NC, and has set some of his books there, including possibly his most famous novel, The Notebook.
9. Ann B. Ross (1936 – Present) was born in Hendersonville, NC. She is a NY Times best-selling author of the Miss Julia series, which includes more than 20 books.
10. Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) – lived in Flat Rock, NC from 1945 until his death in 1967. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for poetry (Cornhuskers and Complete Poems, 1951) and one for history (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years).

That’ s my top 10! How about you? Which authors whose works you admire or enjoy have lived in your state?

Thank you to That Artsy Reader Girl for hosting Top Ten Tuesday.