The Land Breakers
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The Land Breakers
''The Land Breakers'' is a 1964 American historical novel by John Ehle. It is the first book in Ehle's seven-volume Appalachian cycle. Plot ''The Land Breakers'' chronicles the settling of an unnamed, uninhabited, remote Appalachian valley by several pioneering families. The valley is located in mountainous country between Watauga County and the towns of Morganton and Old Fort in western North Carolina. The book’s action takes place from 1779 to 1784 and relates the families’ struggles with harsh weather, wild animals, economic pressures, and interpersonal conflicts. Characters * Mooney and Imy Wright are a young Irish immigrant couple who are the first to settle in the valley. * Tinkler Harrison is an elderly, wealthy plantation owner from Virginia who aspires to dominate the new settlement. He is accompanied by his family and several slaves. * Lorry Pollard is Tinkler's daughter, who is raising her young sons Lafayette and Verlin alone after being abandoned by her hu ...
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John Ehle
John Marsden Ehle, Jr. (December 13, 1925 – March 24, 2018) was an American writer known best for his fiction set in the Appalachian Mountains of the American South. He has been described as "the father of Appalachian literature". Life and career John Ehle was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the oldest of five children of Gladys (née Starnes) and John Marsden Ehle, an insurance company division director. His paternal grandparents emigrated from Wales and England. He enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving as a rifleman with the 97th Infantry Division. Following his military service, he went on to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures in 1949 and later a Master of Arts in Dramatic Arts (1953). He also served on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1951 to 1963. During his tenure at UNC-Chapel Hill, he wrote plays for the Americ ...
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HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp. The name is a combination of several publishing firm names: Harper & Row, an American publishing company acquired in 1987—whose own name was the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers (founded in 1817) and Row, Peterson & Company—together with Scottish publishing company William Collins, Sons (founded in 1819), acquired in 1989. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Brian Murray. HarperCollins has publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, and China. The company publishes many different imprints, both former independent publishing houses and new imprints. History Collins Harper Mergers and acquisitions Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corpora ...
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Appalachia
Appalachia () is a cultural region in the Eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York State to northern Alabama and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, to Cheaha Mountain in Alabama, ''Appalachia'' typically refers only to the cultural region of the central and southern portions of the range, from the Catskill Mountains of New York southwest to the Blue Ridge Mountains which run southwest from southern Pennsylvania to northern Georgia, and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. In 2020, the region was home to an estimated 26.1 million people, of which roughly 80% are white. Since its recognition as a distinctive region in the late 19th century, Appalachia has been a source of enduring myths and distortions regarding the isolation, temperament, and behavior of its inhabitants. Early 20th century writers often engaged in yellow journalism focused on sensational ...
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Morganton, North Carolina
Morganton is a city in and the county seat of Burke County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 16,918 at the 2010 census. Morganton is approximately northwest of Charlotte. Morganton is one of the principal cities in the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC Metropolitan Statistical Area. A site five miles north of Morganton has been identified as the Mississippian culture chiefdom of Joara, occupied from AD 1400 to AD 1600. This was also the site of Fort San Juan, built in 1567 by a Spanish expedition as the first European settlement in the interior of North America, 40 years before the English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia. History Joara archeological site The oldest-known European inland (non-coastal) settlement in the United States of Fort San Juan has been identified at Joara, a former Mississippian culture chiefdom located about five miles north of present-day Morganton. In 1567 a Spanish expedition built the fort there, while seeking to establish an interi ...
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Old Fort, North Carolina
Old Fort is a town in McDowell County, North Carolina, McDowell County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 811 people in the 2020 U.S. Census. History Before the arrival of European settlers, the area that is now Old Forts was populated by the Catawba and Cherokee. In the 1500s, Spanish explorers came through the area. English and Scottish settler arrived in the area in the mid-1700s. During the Revolutionary War, a stockade or fort was constructed on land owned by brothers George and Samuel Davidson, "the westernmost outpost of Colonial civilization" It was called Davidson's Fort and was the post for military expeditions such as that of Gen. Griffith Rutherford in 1776. The fort became a site for trading between settlers and Native Americans. The arrival of the Western North Carolina Railway (WNCR) in 1869 stimulated the development of a depot and hotel. In 1871, Sanborn Worthen bought the 2200-acre Old Fort Plantation from George Davidson's grandson and chang ...
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Hal Borland
Harold "Hal" Glen Borland (May 14, 1900 – February 22, 1978) was an American writer, journalist and naturalist. In addition to writing many non-fiction and fiction books about the outdoors, he was a staff writer and editorialist for ''The New York Times''. Early life and education Borland was born on the plains in Sterling, Nebraska, to Sarah M (née Clinaburg) and William Arthur Borland. When Hal was 10, the family moved 30 miles south of Brush, Colorado, where his father staked out a homesteader's claim on the prairie. Hal later detailed his experience on the homestead in his book "High, Wide, and Lonesome." After proving out on the homestead claim, his father sold the homestead and bought a weekly newspaper in Flagler, Colorado, where Hal finished his school years. This experience is detailed in his book "Country Editor's Boy." After attending local schools, he studied at the University of Colorado from 1918 to 1920, majoring in engineering. While there, he held jobs at the '' ...
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Kirkus Reviews
''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. ''Kirkus Reviews'', published on the first and 15th of each month; previews books before their publication. ''Kirkus'' reviews over 10,000 titles per year. History Virginia Kirkus was hired by Harper & Brothers to establish a children's book department in 1926. The department was eliminated as an economic measure in 1932 (for about a year), so Kirkus left and soon established her own book review service. Initially, she arranged to get galley proofs of "20 or so" books in advance of their publication; almost 80 years later, the service was receiving hundreds of books weekly and reviewing about 100. Initially titled ''Bulletin'' by Kirkus' Bookshop Service from 1933 to 1954, the title was ...
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Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax (; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs. After 1942, when Congress terminated the Library of Congress's funding for folk song collecting, Lomax continued to collect independentl ...
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Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926February 19, 2016) was an American novelist best known for her 1960 novel ''To Kill a Mockingbird''. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Lee has received numerous accolades and honorary degrees, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 which was awarded for her contribution to literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book '' In Cold Blood'' (1966). Capote was the basis for the character Dill Harris in ''To Kill a Mockingbird''. The plot and characters of ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936 when she was 10. The novel deals with the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s, as depicted through the eyes of two children. It was inspired by racist attitudes in her hometown of Monroeville, A ...
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Michael Ondaatje
Philip Michael Ondaatje (; born 12 September 1943) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada's most renowned living authors. Ondaatje's literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing ''The Dainty Monsters'', and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed ''The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.'' However, he is more recently recognized for his nationally and internationally successful novel ''The English Patient'' (1992), which was adapted into a film in 1996. In 2018, Ondaatje won the Golden Man Booker Prize for ''The English Patient''. In addition to his literary writing, Ondaatje has been an important force in "fostering new Canadian writing""Michael Ondaatje." In ''An Anthology o ...
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New York Review Books
New York Review Books (NYRB) is the publishing division of ''The New York Review of Books''. Its imprints are New York Review Books Classics, New York Review Books Collections, The New York Review Children's Collection, New York Review Comics, New York Review Books Poets, and NYRB Lit. Description The division was started in the fall of 1999.Vince Manapat, "Meet Edwin Frank: Editor of New York Review Books Classics"
www.metro.us, January 31, 2012.
It grew out of another enterprise called the Reader's Catalog (subtitle: "The 40,000 best books in print"), which sold books through a catalog. Founder Edwin Frank and his managing editor discovered many of the books they wanted to prin ...
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