The Balm of Gilead Tree and Other Stories

Robert Morgan's fiction is "about people who have a deep sense of themselves, who were not created by a huge and complicated society but by a small, simple one in which individual character sprouted slowly and in trial bloomed... wise, eloquent."

One of Robert Morgan's chief claims on our attention is the backbone he puts into the backcountry lore that grounds his work, the stately proprieties and meditative gravity he hews out of the hardscrabble folkways of his native Blue Ridge Mountains... His is a fine-grained, self-implicating intelligence that can span the intricacies of both pine resin and pantoums.

If you grew up in the country or feel an affinity for the mountains, Morgan's [work] will bring you home again; if not, here is an authentic tour of the region.