Robert Morgan
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I. Biography
Robert Morgan was born in Green River in Henderson County, North Carolina, a small community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The mountains are what give him the ideas for his stories. His family owned a lot of land. He
first lived in the old Morgan's house that was by a river. Then when he was three, his grandma Levi died. He moved to the old Levi house at the foot of the Meeting House Mountains. His family had always dreamed of owning their own
home so later on they had started to build one. Morgan has created a set of novels and nine volumes of poems. Morgan studied at the University of Chapel Hill. Then in 1968, he had earned a MFA from
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 1971, he began to teach at Cornell University. He has been the number one professor of English.
Morgan has four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockerfeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship. Morgan also has been awarded the North Carolina Award
for Literature, and the James G. Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He has also received the Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize and the Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.
II. Green River, North Carolina
Green River is a very small valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Green River is considered isolated from the rest of the North Carolina area.
III. Literary Works
The Truest Pleasure
is just one of the books in the set. The Truest Pleasure is a book that Morgan Took a subject and turned the point of it around. The Truest Pleasure is
about taking the subject of Illness and turning it around, trying not to make it seem awful. He got the idea of this book from their family's "medicine rock," a rock that was hollowed
out in the shape of a tub. Morgan's great-great uncle used for washing patients that had been shot or had surgery. His great-great uncle was a legend in Green River. When he started to write The Truest Pleasure
he was not going to include things like sickness, death, and recovery. Then when he started he found that these such things pulled the story together. During the story it says that he kept on reflecting on the thoughts of
deaths and illnesses in his family. He had not known what the world would be like without modern hospitals and such. He wrote the whole book from Ginny's view. IV. Sources
Lee Harrison Child, Ed. Close to Home: Revelations and Reminiscences by North Carolina
Authors. John F. Blair Publishers: Winston-Salem, NC, 1996. This essay was submitted by students of Leslie Andres, a teacher at Lake Norman Charter School in Huntersville, North Carolina.