A Reader's Companion

My parents were born in the 1920s, and grew up on farms in rural North Carolina, as had their parents before them.   They raised tobacco a...

Source Dallas Lore Sharp (1870-1929) was an American nature writer and a professor of English at Boston University.  His 1908 book The ...

My father was an upholsterer and a Baptist preacher.  In his role as an upholsterer, people sometimes gave him unwanted furniture, which h...

George Fort Gibbs Source In a typical used book store, well-known authors amount to only tiny islands in a sea of books by less famil...

Source Janet Frame (1924-2004) was a New Zealand author who wrote uncompromising stories that examined the complex things that go in in...

Mary Elizabeth Braddon Source Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915)  is best known for her novel Lady Audley's Secret , published i...

I attended grade school in a small town that might remind you of Andy Griffith's Mayberry.  My father had a shop on Main Street, and he ...

Source Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855) worked for much of her life as a professional writer.  It seems to have been work she loved a...

There were tobacco warehouses along the French Broad River in Asheville , North Carolina, where I grew up.  During the off-season, when the...

Source Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933) was a very prolific author who wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  His work cover...