The Dead, Alive, and Busy

Selected Essays of Robert Morgan

  • Author(s): Morgan, Robert; Randall Wilhelm, Editor
  • Series:
  • Imprint: University of Tennessee Press
  • Publication Date: 2026-02-27
  • Status: Not Yet Published - Will Back Order
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“This essay collection brilliantly brings together storytelling, poetry, memoir, and Morgan’s energetic engagement with creative works of art. . . . I believe this book will be of interest to Robert Morgan’s fans and scholars—and to those interested in American and Appalachian literature and history.”

—Sandra L. Ballard, editor of Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

For six decades, Robert Morgan has been a preeminent voice in southern Appalachian literature. Growing up in Green River, North Carolina, in the 1950s, he absorbed a variety of influences to inform his later work: his family’s haunting stories, explorations of the mountainous landscape, paperbacks from a bookmobile, lessons from a kind elementary school teacher. Decades later, his acclaimed writing resulted in a fifty-one-year career at Cornell University, a plethora of literary awards, and a place on the New York Times bestseller list. The essays collected in this volume reveal the ways Morgan writes about literature with the same reverence he uses to describe his homeplace.

The Dead, Alive, and Busy is a collection of essays on the author’s personal history, masters of prose, and significant poets. Morgan’s catalogue of literary interests is a melting pot of global traditions, from Leo Tolstoy to Appalachian writers such as Thomas Wolfe and Wilma Dykeman. His analysis covers writers “in a community across time”—including Poe, Hemingway, McCarthy, Carl Sandburg, and the Appalachian poets Jeff Daniel Marion and Jim Wayne Miller. Akin to his own description of Bierstadt’s paintings, Morgan’s writing throughout reflects “intimacy more than spectacle.”

Robert Morgan is a poet, novelist, and essayist from North Carolina. He has been a professor of English at Cornell since 1971 and has published seventeen collections of poetry, six volumes of short fiction, seven novels, two collections of essays, and biographies of Daniel Boone and Edgar Allan Poe.

Randall Wilhelm is a writer, editor, and researcher who lives in Clemson, South Carolina. He is editor of Conversations with Robert Morgan, Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash, and The Ron Rash Reader.