Theme
Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, and the writers, presses, and bookstores that made the county a literary place.
In briefGeorge Moses Horton sold poems to students in 1818, the Hillsborough Recorder began in 1820, Thomas Wolfe and Paul Green wrote at Chapel Hill, and UNC Press was founded in 1922. The records here are the writers, presses and bookstores that made the county a literary place.
841 indexed works are connected with this theme. 77 held at OCPL →
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina, the most widely held first, novels aside. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Narrow these works. Each link opens the search already limited to this theme. Counts are indexed works, not copies on a shelf; a work can carry more than one period or place.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Chapel Hill PL record: North Carolina Authors.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Chapel Hill PL record: North Carolina Authors.
John Ehle's account of the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963 and 1964 and the young people who led them, first published by Harper & Row in 1965. This reprint from Lewisville, North Carolina adds an afterword by Wayne King. Civil rights and race relations in Chapel Hill are its subjects. 340 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Chapel Hill PL record: North Carolina Authors.
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Authors, American.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Durham record: Spencer, Cornelia Phillips, 1825-1908.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Daniel W. Barefoot arranges first-hand recollections of the University of North Carolina by decade, from the 'infant university' of the 1790s through the Civil War years when promise turned to despair, the rebuilding of the 1870s, the 'frosh' life of the 1880s, wartime fame in the 1940s, the controversies of the 1960s and the bicentennial of the 1990s. Thomas Wolfe's student years appear among the voices. Published by John F. Blair of Winston-Salem in 2008, 257 pages.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Chapel Hill PL record: North Carolina Authors.
Will Blythe's account of the Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry, described in its subtitle as thoroughly obsessive, intermittently uplifting and occasionally unbiased. Blythe writes as a Chapel Hill partisan, and the book treats sports rivalries, basketball fans and the social side of the game in North Carolina. Published by HarperCollins in New York in 2006, first edition, 357 pages.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Chapel Hill PL record: North Carolina Authors.
Jean Bradley Anderson's history of the Bennehan and Cameron families and their plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh, on lands that lay in Orange County until Durham County was formed from it in 1881. Published by the Historic Preservation Society of Durham in 1985, the book follows plantation life and ownership across several generations, with genealogical tables, a map, portraits, a bibliography and an index; 227 pages plus plates.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Chapel Hill PL record: North Carolina Authors.
Reviewed in South Atlantic Quarterly (1987).
Recently indexed: The "poet of man," (1859) · AACR 2 headings : a five-year projection of their impact on catalogs (1982) · The acquisition of the Stephen B. Weeks Collection of Caroliniana (1965) · An analysis of the book publications of the University of North Carolina Press, 1922-1952 (1956) · Annual report (1987)
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this theme. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled. Books marked Wider context cover the broader subject rather than this theme itself.
Twenty-seven writers contribute essays, short stories and poems about Chapel Hill to this 2011 anthology from Eno Publishers of Hillsborough, issued under Daniel Wallace's name. Among them are Wells Tower, Jock Lauterer, Mildred 'Mama Dip' Council on a life of cooking, Paul Cuadros on the cooks of Franklin Street, William Leuchtenburg on presidential visits, Karen L. Parker, Bland Simpson, Elizabeth Spencer, Daphne Athas and Lawrence Naumoff. 235 pages with illustrations.
Hillsborough seen by twenty-seven writers in essays, fiction and poems collected by Eno Publishers in 2010. Allan Gurganus writes on renovating old houses, David Payne and Beverly A. Scarlett on the Eno, Brooks Graebner on the courthouse and the churches, Nancy Goodwin keeps a gardener's journal, and Lee Smith offers scenes from 'On Agate Hill'; Randall Kenan, Michael Malone, Hal Crowther, Jill McCorkle, Craig Nova and Jaki Shelton Green also appear. 210 pages.
Biographical study of the playwright Paul Green by Agatha Boyd Adams, edited by Richard Walser and issued by the university library in 1951 in its Library Extension Publication series. Topics include his drama at Chapel Hill and his writing on slavery. A slim book of 116 pages with a portrait.
Jessie Rehder, who taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina, assembled this 1967 anthology of fiction and prose by writers connected with Chapel Hill for UNC Press. Among the pieces are Wallace Kaufman's 'Regard me well', a piece by Frances Gray Patton anatomizing the Southern belle, and early groundwork by Reynolds Price for his first novel; Thomas Wolfe also figures in it. 215 pages.
A collection of short stories written by women and girls living in Orange County, N.C., published in 2005 for Women's History Month.
A picture book of North Carolina writers for young readers by Richard Walser, with brief biographical and bibliographical notes, published by the State Department of Archives and History for use in the schools. First issued in 1957 as Picturebook of Tar Heel Authors; this third edition, revised and enlarged, appeared in 1966, 70 pages. Walser taught English at North Carolina State from 1946.
Reflections by incarcerated students at Orange Correctional Center in Hillsborough, written for a Stepping Stones seminar on the pursuit of justice in African American literature that Patrick Elliot Alexander and Allison Curseen taught from June 20 to August 22, 2011. Writings by Pauli Murray and Martin Luther King Jr. figure in the 54-page collection.
An anthology of poetry and prose by writers of Durham and its surroundings, edited by Judy Hogan with Mary Ellen Priestley and Margaret Stephens and illustrated with Ted Bodenheimer's photographs. Hogan founded Carolina Wren Press, the Durham publisher that issued the 478-page collection in 1987, and helped found the North Carolina Writers' Network.
First printed in the American Historical Association's annual report for 1895, Stephen B. Weeks's study of libraries and writing in eighteenth-century North Carolina fills pages 171 to 267 of that report and was issued separately by the Government Printing Office in 1896. It ends with a bibliography.
Storylines in this theme, earliest first. Each has its own page.
Dated events connected with this theme: sixteen of 160, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 160 dated events in the chronology →
The congress meeting at Hillsborough directed that its proceedings be delivered to James Davis, the province's printer and a delegate for the town of New Bern, who was desired to print them and send a copy to each member. It also named a committee to state and settle his account for services done as printer to the province.
Part of Third Provincial Congress at Hillsborough, 1775 · 15 events
People: Willie Jones · Thomas Person
By about age twenty, George Moses Horton, enslaved on a Chatham County farm, was carrying fruit to the UNC campus on Sundays, and students began paying him to compose love poems and acrostics. His first printed poem appeared in April 1829, the year The Hope of Liberty was published.
Dennis Heartt began publishing the weekly Hillsborough Recorder in February 1820, at three dollars a year. The paper ran until 1879, and its surviving issues are a main record of nineteenth-century Hillsborough and Orange County.
Part of The Hillsborough Recorder begins publication, 1820
People: Dennis Heartt
Subject: Hillsborough Recorder
George Moses Horton’s The Hope of Liberty was published in Raleigh, with supporters hoping sales could finance his freedom.
Elizabeth Keckly purchased freedom for herself and her son in St. Louis, after earlier enslavement in Hillsborough.
Part of Elizabeth Keckly in Hillsborough
People: George Kirkland · Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly
Stephen Beauregard Weeks, class of 1886, published a 72-page catalogue of Philanthropic Society members since 1795, with a short history of the society and notes on members' careers.
Sallie Walker Stockard, a Guilford College graduate, entered UNC's senior class in the fall of 1897, the first year the university admitted women. She became the first woman to graduate from UNC when the class of 1898 received its degrees on June 1, 1898, and she earned a master's degree there in 1900.
Frederick H. Koch organized the Carolina Playmakers at UNC.
Part of The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press · 20 events
People: Frederick H. Koch
Subject: Carolina Playmakers
After seven years in Texas, Royster accepted the Kenan Professorship of English Philology, which he held until his death. Covington says President Chase recruited him back from Austin.
People: Harry Woodburn Chase
On June 12, 1922, university librarian Louis Round Wilson, nine other faculty members and three trustees founded the University of North Carolina Press, the first university press in the South. Its first book, William C. Coker's study of water molds, appeared in 1923, and William T. Couch became director in 1932.
Part of The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press · 20 events
People: William T. Couch · Louis Round Wilson
Paul Green received the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for In Abraham’s Bosom.
Part of The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press · 20 events
People: Paul Green
Viking Press issued Jane Hope, a novel for young readers set in Chapel Hill, whose heroine comes from Philadelphia to live with her grandparents. The Chapel Hill Weekly noted that the author had absorbed the village's history, with a chapter on the Buchanan commencement.
Hardison, a Renaissance specialist with UNC bachelor's and master's degrees, joined the English department in 1957 and edited Studies in Philology. He left in 1969 to direct the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Dillard won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, drawn from her private writings about the surroundings of her home in Roanoke, Virginia. This was years before she lived in Hillsborough.
Young, a Vietnam War correspondent and author, wrote a column for the Chapel Hill Herald from 1996 to 2003.
UNC historian Kathleen DuVal won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, a history of Native American nations over a thousand years. She taught early American and American Indian history at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 15 with a known location.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.
Background from selected state and local sources
Newspapers, photographs, and records of the time
Other catalogs, databases, and guides worth searching
Local organizations that preserve the story and can help you go further
Other catalogs to search and local organizations that can help.
Picture: Library of Congress. Image credits →
More to discover
The Friends connect people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
