University of North Carolina at Asheville
D. Hiden Ramsey Library
Special Collections

Robert Drake
(1930-2001)
 

Southern Appalachian Writers Collection

M2005.05.02-08

The collection was gathered as part of an exhibition of Southern Appalachian Writers held at UNCA in the early 1980's and sponsored by D. H. Ramsey Library and the Southern Highlands Research Center.

I had always been --- indeed still am ---fascinated by what people would tell you about themselves often without knowing it. And I long ago realized that both my imagination and my memory were oriented toward the oral and auditory rather than the visual  --- partly, I am sure,  because of the fine tradition of talk I grew up in, with its predilection for the oral tale told to an appreciative listener or group. Indeed my stories often seem to begin with a snatch of conversation, some remembered phrase which begins to go round and round in my head until I am forced to do something about it on paper. In many ways, then, I suppose I'm like an Ancient Mariner  (an extremely fitting comparison, I think, for any serious writer) whose dreadful compulsion won't let him go until he finds a Wedding Guest to whom he can relate his tale. And so I write."

Although he achieved his Ph.D. at Yale, traveled far, and taught English literature at multiple universities across the country, Robert Drake (born in West Tennessee in 1930) wrote his fiction about the south: its people, its history, its geography.  Often compared to Flannery O’Connor (a writer, coincidentally or not, whom he admired greatly), Drake’s fiction is about the rural south, usually of the previous generation, evoking, then, the sense of a place gone, but not forgotten, just out of reach.  He taught at the University of Tennessee for more than thirty years before his death in 2001.

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