In the small mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe lies at eternal rest just a few steps from William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry. Those graves are a short hop from the great inn where F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to dictate his writing from a body cast, and a half-hour's drive from the estate where the aged Carl Sandburg wrote deep into the night. The city's ties to the world of letters are equally strong today. Gail Godwin and Charles Frazier were schooled in Asheville, for example, and Robert Morgan and Fred Chappell in the immediate area. Stephen Kirk, author of Scribblers, is an editor and would-be literary gadfly. Taking Asheville as his canvas, he learns stories of the area's legendary authors and interviews some of its contemporary greats. Meanwhile, he also seeks out writers living in the shadows of the famous. He meets genre authors who make their living penning romances, Westerns, and mysteries. He immerses himself in the culture of...

When Wilbur and Orville Wright arrived on North Carolina's Outer Banks in the year 1900, they were unknown bicycle mechanics who dreamed of powered flight. Even after they achieved the first heavier-than-air, powered flight in the dunes of Kill Devil Hills on December 17, 1903, they remained obscure. But by the time of Orville's last flights on the Outer Banks in 1911, they were two of the most famous men of the twentieth century. With its lively and often humorous narrative, First in Flight presents a broader context for the Wrights' activities on the Outer Banks than any other book about the famous brothers. It details every aspect of the Wrights' life on the North Carolina coast—the lifesavers they associated with, the local citizens they befriended, the other outsiders who came to the Outer Banks to participate in and report on their experiments, the Wrights' perspective on local lifestyles, and the locals' perspective on them.