Land Breakers Main

"First published fifty years ago in 1964 to great acclaim, The Land Breakers is John Ehle's best-known work of historical fiction, chronicling the hard-won settlement of southern Appalachia. A cinematic saga spanning the Revolutionary War years of 1779 to 1784, The Land Breakers recounts in spare, unflinching prose the challenges, setbacks, and small triumphs of the defiant men and women who were drawn to the wilderness of provincial North Carolina. Eager for opportunity in a land where the easy countryhad been claimed, Ehle's unforgettable characters stake their lives on the settlement of the unnamed high mountain territory. Strong and silent Mooney Wright is the first to make his way into the forbidding mountains. Others steadily follow: the cruel patriarch Tinkler Harrison, his daughter Lorry, the free-spirited Mina Plover. The Land Breakers is a paean to man's capacity for work, and Ehle imbues the hardworking men and women of his book--the land breakers of this young country--with nobility"--
"First published fifty years ago in 1964 to great acclaim, The Land Breakers is John Ehle's best-known work of historical fiction, chronicling the hard-won settlement of southern Appalachia. A cinematic saga spanning the Revolutionary War years of 1779 to 1784, The Land Breakers recounts in spare, unflinching prose the challenges, setbacks, and small triumphs of the defiant men and women who were drawn to the wilderness of provincial North Carolina. Eager for opportunity in a land where the easy country had been claimed, Ehle's unforgettable characters stake their lives on the settlement of the unnamed high mountain territory. Strong and silent Mooney Wright is the first to make his way into the forbidding mountains. Others steadily follow: the cruel patriarch Tinkler Harrison, his daughter Lorry, the free-spirited Mina Plover. The Land Breakers is a paean to man's capacity for work, and Ehle imbues the hardworking men and women of his book--the land breakers of this young country--with nobility. "--
Set deep in the Appalachian wilderness between the years of 1779 and 1784, The Land Breakers is a saga like the Norse sagas or the book of Genesis, a story of first and last things, of the violence of birth and death, of inescapable sacrifice and the faltering emergence of community.Mooney and Imy Wright, twenty-one, former indentured servants, long habituated to backbreaking work but not long married, are traveling west. They arrive in a no-account settlement in North Carolina and, on impulse, part with all their savings to acquire a patch of land high in the mountains. With a little livestock and a handful of crude tools, they enter the mountain world—one of transcendent beauty and cruel necessity—and begin to make a world of their own.Mooney and Imy are the first to confront an unsettled country that is sometimes paradise and sometimes hell. They will soon be followed by others.John Ehle is a master of the American language. He has an ear for dialogue and an eye for nature and a grasp of character that have establishedThe Land Breakers as one of the great fictional reckonings with the making of America.