Charles Frazier of Asheville, NC -- born Nov. 4, 1950

from The Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio):

Today (Nov. 4) is the birthday of Charles Frazier (1950), the author of Cold Mountain (1997), born in Asheville, North Carolina, where his family has lived for several generations. His father, who was researching the family's history, told him the story of an ancestor who had fought in the Civil War and made his way on foot back home to Cold Mountain. Frazier was looking for ideas for the plot of a novel, and knew that this was the story he was looking for. Details about his ancestor were few and far between, and the story his father told him was only about a paragraph long. He decided to write the tale as historical fiction instead, filling in things that he didn't know by reading Civil War diaries, studying the history of the period, and using what he remembered about Appalachian farm life, which was still relatively primitive even in the mid-20th century. But he didn't want to write a typical Civil War story about the battles. "I realized that there are two kinds of books about a war: There's an Iliad, about fighting the war, and about the battles and generals, and there's an Odyssey, about a warrior who has decided that home and peace are the things he wants," he said. "Once I decided that I was writing an Odyssey kind of book instead of an Iliad kind of book, I could move forward with it with some sense of happiness."
He's currently at work on his third novel, Nightwoods, set in the Appalachian Mountains of the 20th century.