The story says that when Morgan came to Cornell in 1971, “I became very interested in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. I began looking into the history of that region, the Cherokee Nation, the geology and geography, and the experience there during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. I became a student of the southern Appalachians.”
Morgan is the author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction, including Gap Creek, a New York Times bestseller.