Notes Concerning the Author
On his website, author Robert Morgan recently wrote: “I was born October 3, 1944 in Hendersonville, North Carolina and grew up on the family farm in the Green River valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As a teenager I was interested in composing music as well as in writing poetry and fiction. But I was encouraged to study science in those “Beat the Russian” years after the first Sputnik was launched. After starting out in engineering and applied mathematics at North Carolina State University, I transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill and graduated in 1965 with a B.A. in English. In 1968 I received a Master of Fine Arts degree from UNC-Greensboro.”
From this beginning Morgan authored 11 books of poetry and 8 books of fiction, including the bestselling novel Gap Creek. He now lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University. Yet as he entered his senior years, he kept reflecting on his youth on the family farm in western North Carolina and the stories of pioneer Daniel Boone and his personal love of the woods and history. Gap Creek and other works of fiction had taught him much he would need to know about the region and times through which the famous woodsman and pioneering leader Boone had explored. The result was perhaps the best biography every written about Boone. And, as you may already know, biographies of men written by men who have developed exceptional writing and story-telling skills, often become the best reading available. Furthermore, in the case of Boone, A Biography, Robert Morgan’s work is extremely well researched and crafted. He is a truth-seeker and a teller of truthful history.
Abstract
Daniel Boone (1734-1820), born in Pennsylvania to English Quaker colonists, migrated with his parents and 10 siblings to the Yadkin River Valley of the western Piedmont region of North Carolina Colony in 1751 and there the Boone’s made their home. At the time of the family’s arrival Daniel was 17 years old. From that location, as he grew into manhood, he explored westward and led hundreds of settlers west over the Cumberland Gap into what would become Kentucky as well as the land across the Ohio River to the north — then eastern frontier land belonging to Virginia Colony. Eventually he led pioneers across the Mississippi River into what would become Missouri, and there he spent his final years, passing away there in 1820.
Yet, “Boone was more than a trailblazer: he fought in the French and Indian War and in the American Revolution; he served in the Virginia Legislature; he was a Freemason; he was a settler, landowner, and sometime surveyor; and his reverence for life in the wilderness inspired Romantic writers like Wordsworth, Bartram, Byron, Whitman — inspired Romanticism itself.”
“Boone was the first great American frontier hero — he cherished the land, and while he wanted to settle it, he also longed to conserve its wildness.” He Married Rebecca Bryan in 1756 and the couple had 9 children who survived to adulthood. He was the grandfather to 68 grandchildren. Although at his death in 1820 in Missouri, what wealth he had accumulated was gone, he left this world with a immense wealth of accomplishments and inspired progeny.
Availability of this Book
We suggest Amazon. Boone is available as a new or used print book and as a Kindle e-book.
HRW