The Road John Ehle Trade Paperback 1998
"In The Road John Ehle's skill as a storyteller brings an early
episode of road building in the North Carolina mountains to rich and
vivid life. Hardship and humor, suffering and dreams are the balance for
survival in a landscape that makes harsh demands on its intruders. Ehle
lets us experience this place, people, and past in a fully realized
novel."—Wilma Dykeman
"The Road is a strong novel by one of our
most distinguished authors. Muscular, vivid, and pungent, it is broad in
historical scope and profound in its human sympathies. We welcome its
return with warm pleasure."—Fred Chappell
Originally published in
1967, The Road is epic historical fiction at its best. At the novel's
center is Weatherby Wright, a railroad builder who launches an ambitious
plan to link the highlands of western North Carolina with the East. As a
native of the region, Wright knows what his railway will mean to the
impoverished settlers. But to accomplish his grand undertaking he must
conquer Sow Mountain, "a massive monolith of earth, rock, vegetation and
water, an elaborate series of ridges which built on one another to the
top."
Wright's struggle to construct the railroad—which requires
tall trestles crossing deep ravines and seven tunnels blasted through
shale and granite—proves to be much more than an engineering challenge.
There is opposition from a child evangelist, who preaches that the
railroad is the work of the devil, and there is a serious lack of funds,
which forces Wright to use convict labor. How Wright confronts these
challenges and how the mountain people respond to the changes the
railroad brings to their lives make for powerfully compelling reading.
The
Author: A native of Asheville, North Carolina, John Ehle has written
seventeen novels and works of nonfiction. His books include The Land
Breakers, The Journey of August King, The Winter People, and Trail of
Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Among the honors he has
received are the Lillian Smith Prize and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial
Award.