A photographic survey based on the author's quarter-century explorations of farm culture in the southern Appalachian region of North Carolina offers a window into the world of its mountain enclaves, in a visual tribute that is complemented by oral histories.

A motley band of characters makes its way into a high mountain valley in northwestern North Carolina to tame the land or to be consumed by it. Five years of struggle to create a community ensue, in which part of the struggle is just to survive. This isthe story of late 18th century life in an untamed country.

Recounts the many broken U.S. treaties with the Cherokees, describes how they were forced to leave their lands in Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina, and looks at the hardships they faced on the trail west.

Product Description: While sitting in her 150-year-old cabin in the mountains of North Carolina at the beginning of the Depression, Collie Wright sees furtive figures emerging from the woods on a chilly, near-winter evening. The figures turn out to be clockmaker Wayland Jackson, a widower on his way to Tennessee to seek work, and his 12-year-old daughter, Paula...read more

"In The Road John Ehle's skill as a storyteller brings an early episode of road building in the North Carolina mountains to rich and vivid life. Hardship and humor, suffering and dreams are the balance for survival in a landscape that makes harsh demands on its intruders. Ehle lets us experience this place, people, and past in a fully realized novel."—Wilma Dykeman"The Road is a strong novel by one of our most distinguished authors. Muscular, vivid, and pungent, it is broad in historical scope and profound in its human sympathies. We welcome its return with warm pleasure."—Fred ChappellOriginally published in 1967, The Road  is epic historical fiction at its best. At the novel's center is Weatherby Wright, a railroad builder who launches an ambitious plan to link the highlands of western North Carolina with the East. As a native of the region, Wright knows what his railway will mean to the impoverished settlers. But to accomplish his grand undertaking he must conquer Sow Mountain, "a massive monolith of earth, rock, vegetation and water, an elaborate series of ridges which built on one another to the top."Wright's struggle to construct the railroad—which requires tall trestles crossing deep ravines and seven tunnels blasted through shale and granite—proves to be much more than an engineering challenge. There is opposition from a child evangelist, who preaches that the railroad is the work of the devil, and there is a serious lack of funds, which forces Wright to use convict labor. How Wright confronts these challenges and how the  mountain people respond to the changes the railroad brings to their lives make for powerfully compelling reading.The Author: A native of Asheville, North Carolina, John Ehle has written seventeen novels and works of nonfiction. His books include The Land Breakers, The Journey of August King, The Winter People, and Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Among the honors he has received are the Lillian Smith Prize and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award.

Discovering Analees Williamsburg, a fifteen-year-old runaway slave in 1810, August King faces a moral dilemma in which he must decide between turning the girl in for a reward or risking his life to help her. Reprint. Movie tie-in.

Product Description: Life with Frank Porter Graham

Brutalized by her sadistic, drug-dealing husband, a charming woman on trial for his murder must battle the macho tradition that pervades her North Carolina mountain town

Amanda and Pinckney Wright move from their small North Carolina mountain settlement to Asheville, where--years later--their three children battle to control Pinckney's life-insurance business

Product Description: John Ehle's classic civil war novel, Tome of Drums, returns to print as a Press 53 Classic. Book three in his seven-book Appalachian series. Borden Deal said: "There have been many books about the Civil War; none of them, with the exception of The Red Badge of Courage, have comes close to the dusty, bloody, grinding truth that John Ehle writes about...read more