Charles Frazier and the Books of Cold Mountain

Island 1

The aftermath of Fredericksburg
From Harper's Weekly, 27 December 1862.

"Where to begin? . . . Malvern Hill. Sharpsburg. Petersburg. Any would do admirably as example of unwelcome visions. But Fredericksburg was a day particularly lodged in his mind" (p. 6).

Winter conditions From Harper's Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion, New York: Harper, 1868.

William Bartram
Travels through North and South Carolina . . .
Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791.

"He had pulled it from a box of books donated by ladies of the capital eager for the intellectual as well as the physical improvement of the patients. . . . It was not a book that required following from front to back . . . The doings of that kind lone wanderer . . . never failed to ease his thoughts" (p. 10).

"Bartram was only a traveler, . . . but to Inman's mind the land stood not as he'd seen it and known it for all his life, but as Bartram had summed it up" (p. 276).

From the Winyah Indigo Society Library, Georgetown, S.C.

Homer in the 19th century

"It made him sad to think that Balis had spent his last days studying on the words of a fool. Then he came upon a line that seemed to have more sense to it. It was this: 'The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.' That, Inman decided, he could consent to" (p. 18).

Shown are an early American edition of Homer's Odyssey (Pope's translation), published in Georgetown, D.C., in 1814, and Sotheby's translation, published in 4 volumes in London in 1834, from the antebellum South Carolina College library.

Daniel Ellis
Thrilling Adventures of Daniel Ellis Written by Himself
New York: Harper, 1867.

An account of the Home Guard's reign of terror against suspected Union sympathizers and deserters in the Appalachian mountain areas of western North Carolina and east Tennessee.

From the Francis Lord Civil War Collection.

Hiding out from the Home Guard From Harper's Weekly, 19 September 1863.

Updated 24 June 1999 by the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
Copyright © 1999, the University of South Carolina.
URL: http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/amlit/frazier/fraz1.html