Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Readalikes
Charles Frazier was born in 1950 in Asheville, North Carolina and grew up in
the mountains of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North
Carolina in 1973, received an M.A. from Appalachian State University, and
a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina in 1986.
Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international
bestseller, and won the National Book Award in 1997. It traces the journey
of Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army - the story is based in
part on Frazier's great-great-uncle , W. P. Inman. A movie
adaptation was released in 2003.
His second novel, Thirteen Moons, was
published in 2006, with an $8 million advance from his USA publisher. He is also the author of Nightwoods and Varina.
He currently raises horses on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, where he
lives with his wife, Catherine, who teaches accountancy, and their daughter
Annie.
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It seems almost incredible that Cold Mountain is your first
novel. Have you ever tried writing fiction before--short stories, or incomplete
unpublished novels?
Like a lot of people, I tried to write some fiction when I was in
my twenties--college age, just after that. It didn't work out so well. I wasn't
happy with what I did; it was sort of pretentious and technically pretty weak.
So I put that idea away and decided that I was going to be an academic and that
I would study other people's writing rather than write myself. But when I got to
be forty, I started wanting to write again for some reason, and found when I
began doing it that what I was doing was very different from what I had done
when I was twenty-five. I liked it better and was happier doing it, and it
seemed to me to be worth doing, suddenly. I think as you get older you get a
sense of what is important in life and what is significant enough to write
about.
Turning to Cold Mountain: Who was the original Inman?
He was my great great uncle. And part of the character was based on
my great grandfather. Both of them went to the Civil War--volunteered in the
first few months of that war fever and went off to battle. This Inman was in
some of ...
Gil (Gillian) Adamson is the author of two books of poetry, Primitive (1991) and Ashland (2003), and a collection of short stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (1995). The Outlander is her first novel and was 10 years in the... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Cold Mountain
Try:
The Outlander
by Gil Adamson
Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he received his MD from East Virginia Medical School. "Every Night for a Thousand Years", the New Yorker story from which this ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Cold Mountain
Try:
Gob's Grief
by Chris Adrian
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