Lenoir is a city in and the county seat of Caldwell County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 18,263 at the 2020 census. Lenoir is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. To the northeast are the Brushy Mountains, a spur of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hibriten Mountain, located just east of the city limits, marks the western end of the Brushy Mountains range.
Blowing Rock is a town in Watauga and Caldwell counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The population was 1,397 at the 2021 census.
Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.
Robert Newton Peck was an American author who specialized in children's and young adult literature. His works include A Day No Pigs Would Die, Millie's Boy, and the Soup series.
Violet Trefusis was an English socialite and author. She is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West that both women continued after their respective marriages. It was featured in novels by both parties; in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography; and in many letters and memoirs of the period roughly from 1912 to 1922. She may have been the inspiration for aspects of the character Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and of Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium (1982).
Dawn Powell was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings, Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in an 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.
Lee Smith is an American fiction writer who often incorporates her background from the American South in her works. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Elizabeth Yates McGreal was an American writer. She may have been known best for the biographical novel Amos Fortune, Free Man, winner of the 1951 Newbery Medal. She had been a Newbery runner-up in 1944 for Mountain Born. She began her writing career as a journalist, contributing travel articles to The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. Many of her books were illustrated by the British artist Nora S. Unwin.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a historical novel by the American author Avi published in 1990. The book is marketed towards children at a reading level of grades 5–8. The book chronicles the evolution of the title character as she is pushed outside her naive existence and learns about life aboard a ship crossing from England to America in 1832. The novel was well received and won several awards, including being named as a Newbery Honor book in 1991.
Virginia Esther Hamilton was an American children's books author. She wrote 41 books, including M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), for which she won the U.S. National Book Award in category Children's Books and the Newbery Medal in 1975.
Denise Giardina is an American novelist. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.
John Crosby was an American newspaper columnist, radio-television critic, novelist and TV host. After winning a Personal Peabody Award for his radio criticism in 1946, he became a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors, serving from 1947 to 1962. During the 1950s, he was generally regarded as the leading critic of television.
Joseph Lenoir Chambers was an American writer, biographer, historian, and Pulitzer prize-winning newspaper editor. He served in the American Expeditionary Forces, and briefly commanded a combat company, during World War I.
Gail Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer. Godwin has written 14 novels, two short story collections, three non-fiction books, and ten libretti. Her primary literary accomplishments are her novels, which have included five best-sellers and three finalists for the National Book Award. Most of her books are realistic fiction novels that follow a character's psychological and intellectual development, often based on themes taken from Godwin's own life.
The Famous Writers School was an educational institution that ran a correspondence course for writers in the 1960s and 1970s. Founded in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, Gordon Carroll, and Albert Dorne, it became the subject of a scandal after a 1970 exposé by Jessica Mitford, who noted the school's questionable academic and business practices.
At Home in Mitford is a novel written by American author Jan Karon. It is book one of The Mitford Years series. The first edition (ISBN 1-56865-347-6) was published in hardcover format by Doubleday in 1994. Penguin Books published the paperback edition in 1996 (ISBN 0-140-25448-X).
Scott Owens is an American poet, teacher, and editor living in Hickory, North Carolina.
The Mitford Years is a series of fourteen novels by American writer Jan Karon, set in the fictional town of Mitford, North Carolina. The novels are Christian-themed, and center on the life of the rector, Father Tim.
Vivian Howard is an American chef, restaurateur, author and television host. From 2013 to 2018, Howard hosted the PBS television series A Chef's Life focusing on the ingredients and cooking traditions of eastern North Carolina — using the backdrop of the Chef & the Farmer restaurant in Kinston, North Carolina, which Howard co-owned with her then-husband and business partner, artist Ben Knight.
Nancy Hale was an American novelist and short-story writer. She received the O. Henry Award, a Benjamin Franklin magazine award, and the Henry H. Bellaman Foundation Award for fiction.
