The Dead Alive And Busy eBook

This essay collection brilliantly brings together storytelling, poetry, memoir, and Morgans energetic engagement with creative works of art. I believe this book will be of interest to Robert Morgans fans and scholarsand to those interested in American and Appalachian literature and history.Sandra L. Ballard, editor of Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

For six decades, Robert Morgan has been a preeminent voice in southern Appalachian literature. Growing up in Green River, North Carolina, in the 1950s, he absorbed a variety of influences to inform his later work: his familys haunting stories, explorations of the mountainous landscape, paperbacks from a bookmobile, lessons from a kind elementary school teacher. Decades later, his acclaimed writing resulted in a fifty-one-year career at Cornell University, a plethora of literary awards, and a place on the New York Times bestseller list. The essays collected in this volume reveal the ways Morgan writes about literature with the same reverence he uses to describe his homeplace.

The Dead Alive and Busy is a collection of essays on the authors personal history, masters of prose, and significant poets. Morgans catalogue of literary interests is a melting pot of global traditions, from Leo Tolstoy to Appalachian writers such as Thomas Wolfe and Wilma Dykeman. His analysis covers writers in a community across timeincluding Poe, Hemingway, McCarthy, Carl Sandburg, and the Appalachian poets Jeff Daniel Marion and Jim Wayne Miller. Akin to his own description of Bierstadts paintings, Morgans writing throughout reflects intimacy more than spectacle.