Uplands: Selected Stories

As with his novels, many of Robert Morgan’s short stories let characters, often women, tell their own stories. Morgan’s earliest publications were short stories, and over six decades he has continued to produce short fiction, along with novels, poetry, essays, and biographies. He has said the short narrative is the most challenging genre, requiring the concision and precision of a poem with the drama and implied character insights of longer fiction. These stories reflect the distinctive features of his poetry, vivid, lyrical, evoking a particular place.

Morgan has found the culture and land of the southern Appalachians especially suited to expression in poetry and short fiction, the beauty of the ridges and valleys, the unique history, the laconic speech of the people, intense bonds of family and community, the storytelling gifts, and long memories. Gathered from five previous volumes of short fiction, Uplands proves greater in impact than the sum of its individual pieces.

Published by: Jesse Stuart Foundation (Hardcover 2025)
Uplands: Selected Stories at Jesse Stuart Foundation

Praise for Robert Morgan:

In Morgan's hands... details become the stuff of stern, gripping drama.

— The New York Times

. . .

Robert Morgan's poems are always exciting for their precise knowledge of country things, and of how things go in the world of natural fact and process. This new collection gives us also some delightful lore from the Southern mountains: we learn of the horse fiddle, and holy cussing, and the intrepid pastor who held off bear or panther with his umbrella.

— Richard Wilbur, former U.S. Poet Laureate

. . .

It is such a pleasure to rest on the fertile banks of [Morgan's] imagination, engaged by a steady current of haunting images and carefully chiseled phrases, that when the final poems comes, the reader feels as if the power company dammed the Green River without putting it to a vote.

— Southern Humanities Review

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