Tag Archives: Great Depression

by | March 13, 2008

Louise Shivers. Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail. Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 2003.

Roxy Walston is a young wife and mother on a Tarborough, N.C. tobacco farm in 1937. Farmlife is simple and tough, and Roxy feels restless, especially when Jack Ruffin is hired to help with the harvest. Roxy feels an instant attraction to Jack and is soon faced with choices that could change her forever. When Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail was first published in 1983, it was praised for its tender evocation of life on a tobacco farm and was named the best first novel of the year by “USA Today.” It was also made into the North Carolina-filmed movie Summer Heat in 1987.

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2003, Edgecombe, Historical, Shivers, Louise

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by | March 13, 2008

David Schulman. The Past is Never Dead: A Gritz Goldberg Mystery. Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 2004.

Gritz Goldberg is a psychiatrist in his hometown of Asheville, N.C., and is working in the same mental hospital where he once spent time as a child. Gritz becomes involved in a decades-old murder case when a local man with a heavy conscience confesses to him that the wrong man was convicted for the 1939 killing of a young woman at the Battery Park Hotel. As Gritz delves into Asheville’s past, he uncovers interesting – - and sometimes disturbing — facts about some of the city’s prominent citizens. Many of Schulman’s characters are based on actual historical figures, including the colorful U.S. Senator Robert Rice Reynolds and the prominent anti-semite William Dudley Pelley. In the course of chasing the down the facts of the case, Gritz learns a great deal about Asheville’s Jewish community in the 1930s.

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2004, Buncombe, Mountains, Mystery, Schulman, David

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by | March 13, 2008

Doug Marlette. The Bridge. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Pick Cantrell, a successful but controversial editorial cartoonist, has just moved from New York to his hometown in North Carolina. In the course of adjusting to his new life, Cantrell learns about his family’s connections to area’s rich textile history, most notably his grandmother Lucy’s involvement in a mill workers’ strike in the 1930s. The novel is set in the fictional town of Eno, North Carolina, most likely based on Hillsborough, and includes scenes in Chapel Hill.

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2001, Marlette, Doug, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Orange, Piedmont

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by | March 13, 2008

Tony Earley. Jim the Boy. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.

Jim is a ten-year-old boy who lives with his mother and her brothers and is just beginning to come to grips with the adult world. The story is set in the fictional southwestern North Carolina town of Aliceville in the 1930s and follows Jim through everyday events as he struggles to understand his family, friends, and through their stories, himself. Aliceville is probably based on Rutherfordton, N.C.

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Filed under 2000, 2000-2009, Earley, Tony, Historical, Mountains, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Rutherford

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by | March 13, 2008

Daphne Athas. Entering Ephesus. New York: Viking, 1971.

The Bishop family has fallen on hard times. Forced to leave their large and comfortable house in Connecticut, they move to the small, provincial town of Ephesus, a fictional Piedmont town based on Chapel Hill. In the midst of the chaos of relocating and adjusting to life in the south, the lively Bishop daughters — Irene, Urie, and Loco Poco — are just entering adolescence. Their thoughts and observations enliven the novel, which is set amidst depression and war in the 1930s and 1940s. There is a small community named Ephesus in Davie County, but this novel is clearly set in a Piedmont college town. Entering Ephesus won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best work of fiction by a North Carolinian in 1972.

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Filed under 1970-1979, 1971, Athas, Daphne, Historical, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Orange, Piedmont

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by | March 13, 2008

Alice Adams. A Southern Exposure. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

At the end of the Great Depression, Harry and Cynthia Baird and their 11-year-old daughter move from Connecticut to Pinehill, N.C., a fictional town probably based on Chapel Hill. Hoping to escape debt, drinking problems, and past mistakes, the family is plunged into small town southern culture. The novel traces their attempts to fit in to a tightly woven community.

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Filed under 1990-1999, 1995, Adams, Alice, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Orange, Piedmont

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