Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook by Georgann Eubanks. University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 440 pages

Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8078-3137-3) takes its readers on 18 literary tours through the mountains of Western North Carolina while at the same time touting the works of the writers included on the tours. As author Georgann Eubanks says in her Preface, “This literary guidebook (and its two companion volumes about the Piedmont and Coastal Plain) are finally books about books, a way to read your way across North Carolina. Each half-or whole-day tour will steer you to the spots that inspired both our state’s native-born writers and the many literary visitors who found their muse here.”

Literary Trails makes its readers aware of the many contributions of these mountains to national and local literature. Here we read of Thomas Wolfe, of course, and his impact on Asheville during his lifetime and afterwards, when his mother’s boarding house became both the center of his most famous novel, Look Homeward, Angel, and a monument to Wolfe himself. We read of Wilma Dykeman, whose novels and histories of this area continue to live in print, and of Horace Kephart, whose study Our Southern Highlanders remains at the top of any resource list for the Southern Appalachians. We read of more recent authors, of Charles Frasier and his involvement with Western North Carolina through his novel, Cold Mountain, of Sharyn McCrumb and how her mystery novels, while set in Appalachia, have gained an enormous audience. Here on these pages we also find mention of The Smoky Mountain News and of writers whose work has appeared on these pages: Gary Carden, George Ellison, and Thomas Rain Crowe.

Eubanks looks at more than 170 writers in her guide. Frequently she quotes from their work or from work written about them. She has a rare talent for taking large subjects and summing them up in a paragraph or two while retaining the reader’s interest. In discussing the Grove Park Inn, for instance, we learn in a single, moderately long paragraph a score of facts about the inn and writers who stayed there. Eubanks then write:

“Every year, the Grove Park Inn marks F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday, September 24, with performances of jazz from the 1920s and special tours of the rooms that Fitzgerald occupied for his two extended stays in 1935 and 1936. Rooms 441 and 443 are still furnished with period pieces from Fitzgerald’s time. The rooms are in the Main Inn, accessible by a small, ninety-one-year-old elevator that was built into the massive stone shaft that serves as a chimney for one of the inn’s enormous fireplaces.”

Here is a writer who loves detail and knows how to marshal facts.

Each tour also looks at local libraries, book shops, museums, literary festivals and readings, and colleges. Book lovers familiar with such stores as Malaprops or Osondu will be delighted to read of the Little Switzerland Book Exchange, whose walls contain more than 100,000 titles, many of them rare or out-of-print books. From Black Mountain to Banner Elk, each town and community featured here receives an excellent short description outside of its literary contributions.

Gaps and errors do exist in Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains. Many of the authors mentioned here, for example, are the more popular ones, the writers who have already won a place in Appalachian literature. Regarding Waynesville, for example, Eubanks devotes two pages to Donald Davis, a renowned storyteller and write , and to Caroline Miller, a Georgian who, after winning the Pulitzer for Lamb in His Bosom, eventually moved to Waynesville, married Clyde Ray, and spent the rest of her life here. Overlooked Waynesville writers include Ila Yount, whose novel Patchwork received a fine critical reception on its publication, and Lewis Green, whose ability to alienate editors, colleagues, and fans is surpassed only by his great writing talents — he is the author of The Silence of Snakes — and his feeling for local people. Eubanks also tells us that Waynesville has a population of 55,000, when in fact that is the population of Haywood County.

But these are quibbles. Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains is overall a delightful guide. The maps and directions are excellent, the writing sparkles, and Donna Campbell’s numerous photographs of authors, places, and historical markers nicely compliment the text.

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Have gas prices got you rethinking that trip to the beach? Does the thought of paying four dollars plus at the pump this summer make you hesitant to head out to Iowa to visit Aunt Maude and Uncle Arthur?

Never fear: the bookman is here (Corny, I know, like Iowa itself). Here’s a way to make that trip and justify the gas expenses. Simply pay a visit your local library and check out their books on tape. Here you’ll find everything from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer. You’ll find audio-tomes on philosophy and history from The Teaching Company. You’ll find Tolstoy and Sharyn McCrumb, Henry James and Donald Davis, fiction and nonfiction.

Take some of these audio-books and hit the trail. Now you have a reason for the drive. Your car is a classroom, you are the student, the book on tape is your teacher. Tell yourself—and it’s likely true—that you’d never listen this way at home to a murder mystery or a lecture on Nietzsche, that there are simply too many distractions.

You’re still paying for the gas. Only now you’re driving a classroom instead of a car.