Robert R. Morgan biography

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Robert R. Morgan

Robert R. Morgan

Robert R. Morgan Biography

Robert Morgan was raised on his family's farm in the North Carolina mountains. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, three books of nonfiction, and eight books of fiction, including the bestselling novel Gap Creek. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University. He won the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 2007.

Robert R. Morgan's website

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Interview

A short 'Note to Readers' from Robert Morgan discussing Gap Creek, including the challenge of Julie's voice.

When I began writing Gap Creek I knew I wanted to tell a story loosely based on the first year of marriage of my maternal grandparents. They had gotten married about a hundred years before on Mount Olivet and moved down to Gap Creek in South Carolina. I knew them as elderly people when I was very young. Grandma, who kept me during the day while my mother worked in the cotton mill, died when I was three. I wanted to tell a story about a woman like her, who did heavy men's work on the farm, and spent her life working for others, for her sisters and her husband, her children and grandchildren, the sick and needy of the community.

I tell my students that you do not write living fiction by attempting to transcribe actual events onto the page. You create a sense of real characters and a real story by putting down one vivid detail, one exact phrase, at a time. The fiction is imagined, but if it is done well, it seems absolutely true, as real as the world around us.

The hardest work I did on Gap Creek was trying to get the voice right. Julie, who tells her own story, is not well educated and is not much of a talker. In fact, she feels inarticulate. She feels she expresses herself best with her hands, with her work. ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Robert R. Morgan at BookBrowse
Chasing the North Star jacket The Road from Gap Creek jacket Lions of the West jacket Gap Creek jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Robert R. Morgan but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • M. Allen Cunningham

    M. Allen Cunningham

    M. Allen Cunningham's debut novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow, set in nineteenth-century Northern California, was a #1 Book Sense Pick and a finalist for the 2005 Book Sense Book of the Year Award alongside Marilynne... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Gap Creek

    Try:
    The Green Age of Asher Witherow
    by M. Allen Cunningham

  • Charles Frazier

    Charles Frazier

    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 ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Gap Creek

    Try:
    Thirteen Moons
    by Charles Frazier

We recommend 5 similar authors

View all 5 Read-Alikes

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