Most influenced by Albert Camus, early Hemingway, all of William Faulkner. Primarily a journalist, having spent more than thirty-five years as an editorialist and roving correspondent, mostly for the Atlanta Constitution and Baltimore Sun, winning numerous press association awards, as well as a share of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A highly seasoned political reporter, he has written extensively on the civil rights movement of the sixties and early seventies. His articles have appeared in many nationally circulated magazines. This is his eleventh book and third work of fiction. He also served in the late seventies as a fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He now spends most of his time free lancing and writing “wicked” novels and short stories, as Fred Chappell, a premier American author and prize-winning poet said of a recent fictional work, The Rosary.

            Of his most recent work, The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork, Chappell wrote: “highrollers and halfwits, preachers and peckerwoods, bootleggers and Bible-thumpers—Hunter James has drawn them all with a casual but accurate hand. Skillfully interweaving personal memoirs with community history, The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork is irresistible. I galloped from page to page and took it hard when the book had to end.”

            “Superbly written and hugely entertaining, James is an excellent writer and a natural storyteller.”—William McKeen, journalistic dean at the University of Florida and author of Rock and Roll is Here to Stay.

            Hunter is a journalist, but he writes like a poet—Wiliam Burris, professor of politics at Guilford College.  

            MORE DETAILS:

Hunter James

5581 Becks Church Road · Winston-Salem, NC 27106

(336) 924-1829       Email: Hunterj@triad.rr..com

www.grassyforkdays.com

Professional Experience: 

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Atlanta, Ga.

Regional correspondent and editorial writer, 1958-1972. also 1979-present (Now free lance)

Old Salem Inc., Winston-Salem, NC.

Developed bicentennial projects and wrote Old Salem Guidebook, 1974-77.

Baltimore Sun, editorial writer, 1966-1970.

      Also: Richmond-Times Dispatch.

Awards/Honors

·        Fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1977-78.

·        Wrote editorials that led to the saving of North Carolina’s scenic New River from a massive hydro-electric project and helped the Winston-Salem Journal win a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, 1970.

·        Numerous awards for news and editorial writing.

·         

Education

Wake Forest University, Wake Forest, NC, 1954

Publications History

Free-lance work: Newsweek, Southern Review, Horizon, National Geographic (book division), Colonial Williamsburg, Southern Review, Mt. Olive Review, Wachovia, Historic Preservation, Roanoke Review, Oasis, Southern Magazine, Southern Cultures, many others.

Books

The Quiet People of the Land, a story of Moravian pietists during the American Revolution (1976), University of North Carolina Press.

Old Salem Guidebook, a guide to the history and architecture of Old Salem, N.C., 8th printing, (1977), Old Salem.

All the Forgotten Places, Alabama nostalgia snf civil rights, (1981), Peachtree Publishers.

They Didn’t Put That on the Huntley-Brinkley, a Vagabond Reporter Encounters the New South. (1993). University of Georgia Press. (reprinted as paperback 2008)

Smile Pretty and Say Jesus, The Last Great Days of PTL (1993), University of Georgia Press. (Also being issued in paperback, 2008.)

Atlanta after Sherman (Poetry) (1993)   St. Andrews Press.

The Candidate, the ‘Commies,’ and the World’s Longest Camel (novel 1996)

The Last Days of the Big Grassy Fork.   (2002) (Memoir, history), University Press of Kentucky

The Famous Embroidered Towels of Dusseldorf.  Novel.  2009.  (contract with Canadian publisher Zumaya Publications.)

The Return of Lilith. Novel.  Novel 2009