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Charles Frazier Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Charles Frazier
Photo © Phil Bray / © Miramax Films

Charles Frazier

Charles Frazier Biography

Charles Frazier was born in 1950 in Asheville, North Carolina and grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1973,  received an M.A. from Appalachian State University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina in 1986. 

Cold Mountain
, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, and won the National Book Award in 1997.  It traces the journey of Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army - the story is based in part on Frazier's great-great-uncle , W. P. Inman.   A movie adaptation was released in 2003.

His second novel, Thirteen Moons, was published in 2006, with an $8 million advance from his USA publisher. He is also the author of Nightwoods and Varina.

He currently raises horses on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Catherine, who teaches accountancy, and their daughter Annie.



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Interview

Charles Frazier offers an in-depth interview regarding Cold Mountain, including which elements of Inman's story in the novel were real and why he chose his unconventional rhythm and timbre writing style.

It seems almost incredible that Cold Mountain is your first novel. Have you ever tried writing fiction before--short stories, or incomplete unpublished novels?
Like a lot of people, I tried to write some fiction when I was in my twenties--college age, just after that. It didn't work out so well. I wasn't happy with what I did; it was sort of pretentious and technically pretty weak. So I put that idea away and decided that I was going to be an academic and that I would study other people's writing rather than write myself. But when I got to be forty, I started wanting to write again for some reason, and found when I began doing it that what I was doing was very different from what I had done when I was twenty-five. I liked it better and was happier doing it, and it seemed to me to be worth doing, suddenly. I think as you get older you get a sense of what is important in life and what is significant enough to write about.

Turning to Cold Mountain: Who was the original Inman?
He was my great great uncle. And part of the character was based on my great grandfather. Both of them went to the Civil War--volunteered in the first few months of that war fever and went off to battle. This Inman was in some of ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Charles Frazier at BookBrowse
Varina jacket Nightwoods jacket Thirteen Moons jacket Cold Mountain jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Charles Frazier but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Gil Adamson

    Gil Adamson

    Gil (Gillian) Adamson is the author of two books of poetry, Primitive (1991) and Ashland (2003), and a collection of short stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau (1995). The Outlander is her first novel and was 10 years in the... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Cold Mountain

    Try:
    The Outlander
    by Gil Adamson

  • Chris Adrian

    Chris Adrian

    Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he received his MD from East Virginia Medical School. "Every Night for a Thousand Years", the New Yorker story from which this ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Cold Mountain

    Try:
    Gob's Grief
    by Chris Adrian

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