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Suggested Reading
Mostly, these books are about, or take place in, the South. Although many are not specifically about our immediate area, they'll still “take you home again.” Click on the book cover or title that interests you, and you'll be sent to Amazon.com or some other venue, where you can learn more about it. Use your browser's Back button to return to this page.
Barry Yelton
The title of Barry Yelton's Scarecrow in Gray is derived from the impression of the condition of the Confederate soldiers as described by a new [North Carolina] recruit, Francis Yelton, the author's great-grandfather. The book is a personal, emotional tale of the new private's adventures during the final year of the Civil War, in which the men were all so starved they looked like scarecrows. (From a reader review on Amazon.com.)
Yelton, a Forest City native, married Judy Jackson, daughter of the late Clyde and Ruby Jackson. They currently live on Beason Road in Cliffside and attend Cliffside Baptist Church, where Barry serves as a deacon.
Anita Price Davis & James M. Walker
Rutherford County in the Korean War
Highlights the Korean War-era service and sacrifice of the people of Rutherford County. An intimate and revealing portrait of the strength of a community and the character of its people. Nearly 20 photos and write-ups of Cliffside men and women who served during the Korean conflict.
Fred First
“Both down-to-earth and heartwarming, the Slow Road Home is just one of those books that enrich your experience as a reader... [The author is] a good companion, using his knowledge as a naturalist, his eye for a picture, and his decidedly poetic voice to point out all the small things one might otherwise miss, while spinning a yarn that captivates the imagination.” (A reader's comment.)
Alfred Reno Bailey
Cliffside: Portrait of A Carolina Mill Town
Words and pictures portraying the gentle and loving nature of Cliffside and the generations of people who have called it home. Two hundred fourteen photos of the places and people of Cliffside from the earliest days to the 1980s. Photos of or references to over 400 of the town's citizens.
Judson Mitcham
Narrator Ellis Burt, the 74-year-old son of a poor white Georgia sharecropper, grew up during the Depression and served six years in the penitentiary while still a young man. Moving restlessly back and forth from time present to time past, he recalls his childhood, courtship and marriage, trying to sort out what brought him to the one awful moment when he fell hapless victim to his early social deprivation.
Anita Price Davis, James M. Walker
Rutherford County in World War II, Vol. II
A follow-up to Rutherford County in World War II continues to illustrate the tremendous contributions of a brave community to the World War II effort. Patriotic photographs, many of which were collected by the authors during personal interviews with local veterans and other dedicated residents, memorialize this proud county’s service and commitment to the war effort.
You'll recognize several of those included in the book: Glenn McKinney; Hollis Owens, Jr.; Dan Scruggs; Robert Condrey; Solon Smart; and others.
Pamela Duncan
“Plant Life is an American classic...it presents a compelling and moving portrait of an entire community. In this case, it is the life of a cotton mill (in Russell, N. C.) and three generations of women who work there...Stark, poetic, funny, gritty, and intense, their stories will move you to tears and make you laugh at the same time. Never have the lives of Southern working women been so well documented, their stories so truly told.” —Lee Smith, novelist
[Pamela Duncan was born in Asheville and raised in Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and Shelby, N.C. She holds a B.A. in journalism from UNC Chapel Hill and an M.A. in English and creative writing from NC State University in Raleigh.]
Anita Price Davis, James M. Walker
Rutherford County in World War II
Rutherford County gave generously and selflessly to World War II. Local men and women participated in every significant engagement of the war, in every imaginable capacity, in every branch of service. Several Cliffside men are represented in the book, among them Grover Haynes, Jr. and James Price.
Anita Price Davis
North Carolina During The Great Depression
Through interviews with survivors of the Depression, the use of photographs taken by federally supported photographers and research into the history of the period, this work provides an accurate and even uplifting portrait of the people of the Mountains, Piedmont and Coastal areas of North Carolina in the 1930s.
Martha Mason
Breath: Life in the Rhythm of an Iron Lung
A memoir by an extraordinary Lattimore, N.C. women who has spent over 50 years in an iron lung. Famous author Patricia Cornwell says: “I have long been inspired by the way [Martha] has lived so courageously and gracefully above the tragedy of her circumstances.”
Doug Marlette
A Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, Marlette has written a first novel based on tidbits of family lore, primarily concerning his grandmother Gracie Pickard, who was involved in the bloody Great Textile Strike of 1934. This work of oppression, rebellion, family tradition, love, and death sheds light on a little-known chapter of North Carolina history and contains just the right mix of humor and dignity.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (Editor)
Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World
Drawing on oral interviews and workers' letters, the authors re-create the village world of the cotton mills of the Carolina Piedmont region from its beginnings in the 1880s until this distinctive cultural fabric began to unravel in the 1930s.
You can enjoy much of the book's contents at this website.
Anita Price Davis and Barry E. Hambright
Images of America— Chimney Rock and Rutherford County
Contains more than 225 photographs of Rutherford County—and features many Cliffside scenes and people. The book is organized by townships, and includes many photographs of each township.
Available at Fireside Bookstore and Grindstaff's Interiors in Forest City, NC.
Rick Bragg
Bragg's memoir of a hardscrabble Southern youth pays moving tribute to his indomitable mother and struggles to forgive his drunken father.
Rick Bragg
Bragg's heartfelt biography of his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum. Marvelous stories collected from various relative are not just snapshots of a colorful character. They're also the author's tribute to an oral culture with tenacious roots and powerful significance in the American South.
Bill Bryson
A Walk in the Woods
Rediscovering America on the Appalachian TrailYou're treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through
Olive Ann Burns
A novel full of warm humor and honesty as told by Willy Tweedy, a fourteen-year-old boy living in a small, turn-of-the-century Georgia town
Real Heros: Rutherford County Men Who Made the Supreme Sacrifice During World War II
A total of 149 service men from Rutherford County sacrificed their lives beteen Dec. 7, 1941 and Dec. 31, 1945. The book is a tribute to them and to their sacrifice. Contains photos and news accounts of each man's background, his passing and his survivors.
[The author, Dr. Anita Price Davis, Professor of Education at Converse College, Spartanburg, S.C., is a native and resident of Ellenboro, N.C. She is the granddaughter of P.R. Price, well-known owner of the large general store that stood for decades at the intersection of Highways 74 and 120.]
Clyde Edgerton
She had as much business keeping a stray dog as she had walking across Egypt--which not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She's Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen, who at 78, might be slowing down just a bit. When young, delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog.
Fannie Flagg
Fried Green Tomatoes at
the Whistle Stop CafeFannie Flagg mixes direct and empowering confrontations with racism, sexism, and ageism with the colorful and endearing language of the depression-era South and the cafe's recipes for grits, collard greens, and, of course, fried green tomatoes.
George P. Reynolds (Editor), Susan Walker (Editor), Eliot Wigginton (Contributor)
An oral history of the Depression-era South presents the voices of Appalachian citizens and discusses folk arts, homespun crafts, Appalachian lore, boarding houses, railroad building, and the WPA.
Kaye Carver Collins (Editor), Lacy Hunter (Editor)
Celebrates the rituals and recipes of the Appalachian homeplace, including a one-hundred page section on herbal remedies, and segments about planting and growing a garden, preserving and pickling, smoking and salting, honey making, beekeeping, and fishing, as well as hundreds of firsthand narrative accounts from Appalachian community members.
Charles Frazier
In the waning months of the Civil War, a wounded Confederate veteran named Inman gets up from his hospital bed and begins the long journey back to his home in the remote hills of North Carolina.
Kaye Gibbons When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
Kaye Gibbons
Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong.
Rod Gragg
The unforgettable story of the 26th North Carolina Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg. In July 1863 the regiment's eight-hundred-plus troops--young men from North Carolina's mountains, farmlands, and hamlets--were thrust into the firestorm of Gettysburg, the greatest battle ever fought in North America.John Grisham
In rural Arkansas in 1952, it's harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the family has hired a crew of migrant Mexicans and “hill people”to pick 80 acres of cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream team. But it's backbreaking work, particularly for the 7-year-old narrator, Luke.
Allan Gurganus
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
Lucy Marsden married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.
Jan Karon The Mitford Years
(4 volume set)
At Home in Mitford
A Light in the Window
These High, Green Hills
Out to CanaanWelcome to Mitford, North Carolina, the small mountain town at the center of Jan Karon's [first four] bestselling novels about rector Father Tim and the heartwarming cast of characters surrounding him.
Scotti Kent
From the search for a lost colony to the filming of a television drama in Wilmington, the twenty-seven episodes presented in It Happened in North Carolina take readers of all ages on a lively tour through the history of the Old North State. Get the inside story on such events as the North Carolina gold rush, the Wright brothers' first real flight, a misplaced Rose Bowl game, and the case of the telltale laundry ticket.
Barbara Kingsolver
The setting is an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, in a wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness. Kingsolver recounts not one but three intricate stories.
Harper Lee
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus.
Robert Morgan
...opens with one wrenching death and ends with another. In between, this novel of turn-of-the-century Appalachian life works in fire, flood, swindlers, sickness, and starvation--a truly biblical assortment of plagues, all visited on the sturdy shoulders of 17-year-old Julie Harmon.
Gerald Nachman With just the quote of a jingle or a telling announcer's phrase, Gerald Nachman evokes a whole era and an important segment of our social history.
T. R. Pearson
A Short History of a Small Place
Young Louis Benfield tells the story of his tiny little North Carolina town. There is the looniness of his family, the town of characters, the charm and naviete that gives us a world unknown, and stories that deserve to be told about how it is to grow up a certain kind of way.
T. R. Pearson
Louis Benfield's stories ramble like a footpath through the North Carolina hills, with sentences that continue for whole paragraphs and paragraphs that continue for pages, creating a style that seems incomprehensible on the page but which reveals its meaning when read aloud, in all its Southern baroque glory.
Ron Rash
The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth
and other stories from Cliffside, North CarolinaA reader writes: I am familiar with the area known as Cliffside; and in Ron Rash's book, I found it easy to relate to the instances and the people that are described. The stories are humorous, and the book is a good one to pick up after a long day at the mill.
Ferrol Sams Stories rich with Southern culture of a bright, sensitive lad growing up on farm in Georgia during the Depression.
Dori Sanders
Clover is a 10-year old black girl from a small town in South Carolina, whose life changes forever when her father dies and she is forced to forge a new relationship with the white stepmother she hardly knows.
[Dori Sanders live and writes in York County, S.C.]
Lee Smith ...traces the roots of an extended, country-western “singing”' family from an 1830's hollow to contemporary Nashville.
Lee Smith
Ivy Rowe may not have much education, but her thoughts are classic, and her experiences are fascinating. Born near the turn of the century in the Virginia Mountains, Ivy's story is told completely through letters she is forever writing, and that you will forever want to read....
Lee Smith
A childhood memory re-experienced, a funeral that brings about a family reunion, and the excavation of a swimming pool on the site of an old well, uncover family secrets and air the dirty linen in this behind-the-scenes look at life and family, memory and forgetfulness, anger and forgiveness in a small Southern town.
Bailey White
Bailey White--whose accounts of Southern eccentricity have enchanted millions of listeners to National Public Radio--offers a humorous, touching, story-filled memoir of her home in south Georgia.
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