This novel, Adams’s last, continues the story of the Baird family begun in A Southern Exposure. The story is set in the period during and immediately after World War II in the fictional Piedmont town of Pinehill. In tracing a number of crises, large and small, Adams portrays a large and diverse cast of characters and gives special attention to the details of domestic life in North Carolina in the 1940s.
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Comments Off on Alice Adams. After the War. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Filed under 2000, 2000-2009, Adams, Alice, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Orange, Piedmont
The Bishop family has fallen on hard times. Forced to leave their large and comfortable house in Connecticut, they move to the small, provincial town of Ephesus, a fictional Piedmont town based on Chapel Hill. In the midst of the chaos of relocating and adjusting to life in the south, the lively Bishop daughters — Irene, Urie, and Loco Poco — are just entering adolescence. Their thoughts and observations enliven the novel, which is set amidst depression and war in the 1930s and 1940s. There is a small community named Ephesus in Davie County, but this novel is clearly set in a Piedmont college town. Entering Ephesus won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best work of fiction by a North Carolinian in 1972.
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Comments Off on Daphne Athas. Entering Ephesus. New York: Viking, 1971.
Filed under 1970-1979, 1971, Athas, Daphne, Historical, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Orange, Piedmont
In this novel set amidst the Civil Rights protests of the early 1960s, Beryl Rosinsky has graduated from high school and is anxious to get away from her activist mother and her hometown of Washington, D.C. She enrolls at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she finds a different world — conservative, Southern, and with long-standing campus cliques firmly established. Beryl is gradually drawn into local Civil Rights protests, which are may be based on actual demonstrations by UNC students against segregated businesses in Chapel Hill. As a result of her own political awakening, Beryl ends up with a deeper understanding and appreciation of her mother.
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Comments Off on Ellyn Bache. The Activist’s Daughter. Duluth, Minn.: Spinsters Ink, 1997.
Filed under 1990-1999, 1997, Bache, Ellyn, Orange, Piedmont
At the end of the Great Depression, Harry and Cynthia Baird and their 11-year-old daughter move from Connecticut to Pinehill, N.C., a fictional town probably based on Chapel Hill. Hoping to escape debt, drinking problems, and past mistakes, the family is plunged into small town southern culture. The novel traces their attempts to fit in to a tightly woven community.
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Comments Off on Alice Adams. A Southern Exposure. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Filed under 1990-1999, 1995, Adams, Alice, Novels Set in Fictional Places, Orange, Piedmont
