Appalachian State University

Charles Frazier is an American historical novelist. He won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction for Cold Mountain. Frazier was born in... Asheville, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1973. He earned an M.A. from Appalachian State University in the mid-1970s, and received his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina in 1986. He currently raises horses on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Catherine, who teaches accounting, and their daughter Annie. Cold Mountain was his first novel, published in 1997 by Atlantic Monthly Press. It traces the journey of Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War. The work is rich in the culture and sensibilities of the North Carolina mountains and is based on local history and stories handed down by Frazier's father about Frazier's great-great-uncle William Pinkney Inman. Inman, who was from the area around Cold Mountain in western North Carolina, served in the Confederate Army from which he deserted after being wounded twice and is reputedly buried in a local cemetery.
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