A Study Guide for Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535820929

Book preview

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Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier

1997

Introduction

When Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain was published in 1997, it gained immediate critical and popular success, lasting sixty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and gaining the National Book Award along with other accolades that year. Readers responded to the stirring tale of a Confederate soldier named Inman, his long journey home from the horrors of the Civil War, and his bittersweet reunion with the woman who waited for him. The novel cuts back and forth between Inman's difficult journey that tests his physical as well as his emotional strength and Ada's tale of her own struggles to survive in a harsh landscape and violent time.

Stories of Frazier's ancestors along with those of the North Carolina mountaineers who were caught up in the frenzy of the war years became the inspiration for the novel. Frazier explains in an interview with Salon, The story seemed like an American odyssey and it also seemed to offer itself as a form of elegy for that lost world I had been thinking about. Serving as a model for the fictional Inman was Frazier's great-great-uncle W. P. Inman, who also turned his back on the war and met a similar fate. Cold Mountain is a moving tribute to those who were lost in the war and those who survived it, as well as a celebration of an indomitable sense of hopeful readiness in confronting the possibilities life holds.

Author Biography

Charles Frazier was born on November 4, 1950, in Asheville, North Carolina, to Charles, a high-school principal, and Betty, a librarian and school administrator. He grew up in small neighboring towns and graduated from Franklin High School in 1969 with a vague aspiration to teach literature. He did his undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his favorite authors were Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and Edgar Allan Poe. After earning a B.A. there in 1973, Frazier completed an M.A. program at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, graduating the following year.

Frasier tried his hand at writing fiction but was disappointed with the results and so turned his attention to teaching and academic writing. While he was pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he specialized in twentieth-century American literature, he completed his first book, Developing Communications Skills for the Accounting Profession (1980), a practical business manual.

After earning his Ph.D., Frazier accepted a teaching position at the University of Colorado. His next book, based on his travels to South America, Adventuring in the Andes: The Sierra Club Travel Guide to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, the Amazon Basin, and the Galapagos Islands, was published in 1985.

In 1986, Frazier and his wife moved back to North Carolina when he accepted a teaching position at North Carolina State