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| Professor Robert Morgan's novel Gap Creek has been widely touted, including by Oprah's Book Club. Matthew Fondeur/University Photography |
So far, the 21st century has been very good to Robert Morgan, a writer whose novels often inhabit lives and landscapes of an America rare and old as a stand of virgin timber.
Ten days into the year 2000, Cornell's Kappa Alpha Professor of English got a call at home from a woman who didn't announce herself and, Morgan said, "right away started telling me about how much she liked my book."
The book, Gap Creek, had recently gone into a second printing, and Morgan was savoring the fine reviews it had garnered. The paperback of his previous book, The Truest Pleasure, had gone into a second printing, and his novel The Hinterlands was just about sold out as well.
"I was very happy, feeling wonderful," Morgan said. "Then it was like all heaven broke loose."
The anonymous caller praised Morgan's storytelling, asking specific questions about Gap Creek and finally wondered aloud if Morgan would be available to speak at her book club.
"I thought this was somebody in South Carolina who had a book club, and I said I'd consider it, if and when I was in her area. I asked where her book club was, and she said 'Chicago,' and then I knew it was Oprah Winfrey," Morgan said. "I told her 'My God, but you just made my day.'"
That night, Morgan, 55, kept to his farmer's hours, in bed by 10 p.m. and up at 6 a.m. to write.
"I didn't break stride," he said of his Spartan -- or Calvinist -- response to the news. "The whole thing has been amazingly calm for me. Maybe it's my age. "
It was not so calm at Algonquin publishers, where the imprimatur of Oprah's Book Club meant a rush order of at least 600,000 copies of Gap Creek. Algonquin's parent company, Workman Publishing Co. of New York, is handling the additional press runs.
Gap Creek and its author are featured on today's (Feb. 17) Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast in the Ithaca area at 4 p.m. on channels 9 and 12.
It was the second time in three months that a Cornell-affiliated work was selected for Oprah's Book Club. Last fall, Manette Ansay's Vinegar Hill was chosen and featured in People magazine. Ansay is a 1991 graduate of Cornell's MFA writing program.
Morgan is the author of 10 books of poetry, three collections of short stories and three novels, including Gap Creek. He has won the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize, the North Carolina Award in Literature and the Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize. His short stories have appeared in Epoch, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and New Stories from the South. He also has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
Oprah's Book Club debuted in 1996 and since that time has helped launch 28 best sellers, boosted sales of more than 20 million books and made a few otherwise obscure authors very comfortable.
"The Oprah phenomenon is one of the most unexpected things to happen in publishing in recent years," said Morgan. "Here we have television, which was supposed to have destroyed reading to a great extent, being used by Oprah to promote reading -- no one could have predicted that. She persuades a vast audience that she really likes a book and that if she liked it that much, they will like it too."
Since receiving her blessing, Gap Creek has been on Amazon.com's best-seller list.
Although he's certainly excited, Morgan is still in the same tax bracket he occupied prior to Oprah's call. No doubt that's about to change. And yet, the ecstasy of arrival is tempered by a mature author's sense of himself.
"If this had happened when I was 30, I might think it would change my lifestyle," he said. "But I know who I am: I write and I teach. That's what I do, and that's what I will continue to do."
Since the call, Morgan's plate is full and piling up. He's scheduled for a batch of interviews with national media, a few guest readings and is teaching two classes this semester.
Last month, Morgan joined Oprah's film crew on site in North Carolina Appalachian hill country, where Gap Creek is set. A native of the North Carolina mountains, Morgan was raised on land settled by his Welsh ancestors. The crew visited Morgan's birthplace near Cicero Mountain and the Green River Valley, the primal source of much of his work.
Morgan began his college career as neither poet nor prose writer. He is the son of poor but landed dirt farmers, who were devout fundamentalists, avid readers and spirited storytellers. Morgan would have done them proud if he became a preacher or an engineer. The Good Book yielded to the math book and in the spirit of the Space Age, Morgan envisioned a career in aerospace. He left high school at 16, without a diploma. Nonetheless, high SAT scores got him into Emory University at Oxford, Ga. The campus proved too provincial for the intellectually restless Morgan, and he transferred to North Carolina State at Chapel Hill. Still keen on math and engineering, he also was attracted by N.C. State's percolating literary life. When a glitch in the system kept him out of a class in differential equations, Morgan substituted a creative writing class with Guy Owen. That switch altered the course of his life. Owen came in class one day with a story Morgan had written and said, "When I read this story, I wept."
"None of my math teachers had ever said anything like that," Morgan writes in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. "From that moment on, I was hopelessly hooked and addicted to writing."
Morgan later received an MFA from North Carolina in Greensboro. He started out writing short stories, but fell in love with poetry. He came to Cornell in 1971, originally hired to teach poetry. From 1970 to 1980, he didn't write any fiction. In the summer of 1984, Morgan wrote a short story every week until the form made sense. He deliberately avoided a poetical approach to language.
"I told myself I was not going to write stories like a poet. I wanted to write stories with dynamic tension and conflict, with a lean style that kept the reader focused on the story itself, not the language," he said.
In 1987, his story "Night Thoughts" was published in Epoch with encouragement from his Cornell colleagues Lamar Herrin and Michael Koch. In 1988, a collection of Morgan's stories called The Blue Valleys was published by Peachtree Publishers to good reviews.
Throughout his return to prose, Morgan has repeatedly chosen the voice of a female protagonist.
In Gap Creek, Morgan writes from the perspective of Julie Harmon, a different creation entirely from the articulate, lyrical voice of Ginny in The Truest Pleasure, Morgan's 1995 novel. Morgan says Gap Creek was written in just four months. But it took four years to get the voice of Ginny out his head so he could "hear" Julie Harmon, he said.
"Hers is a very stripped down voice, she speaks in simple sentences," said Morgan. "Once I got that voice, the rest of the story went pretty quickly."
And then one afternoon in the year 2000, he got a phone call from Oprah.
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