82
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
in notes contributed by NCLR staff
memoriam:
The journey of
john ehle
“John rendered the
mountain world with its
people
i knew so well in
a way that made both the
land
and its inhabitants
larger and more than
life.”
real
Read about TERRY ROBERTS within the review of his latest novel in this issue. He has contributed frequently to NCLR, including essays on John Ehle in 2010 and 2012. JOHN EHLE (1925–2018) earned a bachelor’s degree in radio, television, and motion pictures and a master’s in dramatic arts from UNC Chapel Hill. In 1967, he married the British actress Rosemary Harris, and they have a daughter, Jennifer Ehle, also an actress. His numerous honors include the North Carolina Award for Literature from the Governor in 1972, the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council in 1995, induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 1997, and the R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for significant contributions to North Carolina Literature from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association in 2008.
by terry roberts I first became aware of John Ehle through his novels, which I read voraciously and with wonder in my late teens and early twenties, and again when I was a young high school English teacher in the mountains of western North Carolina. When I first thought of contacting John, it was 1980 or thereabouts. At the time, I longed to become a writer myself, and John’s novels, especially the mountain novels, spoke to me both as a native of the Southern mountains and as a would-be writer. I was intensely moved by the depth and power of what he had accomplished working with a landscape that I thought of as my own. John rendered the mountain world with its people I knew so well in a way that made both the land and its inhabitants larger and more real than life. Although I was only twenty-five years old, I had lived enough to realize that he had given the full measure of human dignity to people whom most Americans would have dismissed as hillbillies or worse. I then did what one did in that time before internet and cell phones: I wrote John a letter – carefully phrased and not too long – to tell him just how much his fiction meant to me. I folded in a few questions about his work, for which I truly wanted answers, but the questions were also designed to elicit a response. Maybe I would hear something in return, even if it was only a form letter of some kind.
OPPOSITE TOP John Ehle, circa 1980