Robert Morgan grew up on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and currently lives in an old farmhouse outside Ithaca, New York. He is the author of eleven books of poems, including Topsoil Road, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Campbell-Brockman Poetry Award, the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Greensboro Review Amon Liner Poetry prize, and Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize. He has also published eight novels, among them Gap Creek, which was a New York Times Notable Book, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
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Robert Morgan has found a most engaging way to envision and explain American expansion from early nationhood until the eve of Civil War. Fourscore years come alive through biographical vignettes that pull no punches. The project is meditative rather than celebratory. Hispanic responses to the consequences of Manifest Destiny are made stunningly clear. Nation-building accrued human costs as well as remarkable heroes—all revealed with Morgan’s customary grace and flair. This is engrossing as well as judicious history, narrated by a writer who knows the terrain first hand.— Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of PEOPLE OF PARADOX and MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY
