Background on Charles Frazier and Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1950.The son of a high school principal, he spent his childhood in North Carolina, in the area about which he writes in Cold Mountain. He went to the University of North Carolina and received a Ph.D. in English Literature in 1986. He married his wife, Katherine, an accounting professor, in 1976. They have one daughter, Annie, and live outside Raleigh, North Carolina, where they raise horses.
Frazier has had a varied career: He taught early American literature at the University of Colorado; he also taught at a college in North Carolina for a number of years. He travelled extensively in South America and in 1985, he wrote (with Donald Secreast) Adventuring in the Andes: The Sierra Club Travel Guide to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, the Amazon Basin, and the Galapagos Islands.
In 1990, he began researching and writing Cold Mountain. He wrote slowly, about a page a day. When the novel was about half done, he showed it to his friend, the writer Kaye Gibbons. She loved it and sent it to an agent; it was sold almost immediately and was published in 1997. Both the critics and the public loved it: it was on the bestseller lists, and it won the National Book Award in 1997.
The novel was inspired by Frazier's great great uncle, Inman, who fought in some of the most important battles of the Civil War, was wounded, deserted, and walked over 300 miles to get home. Frazier knew very little about him; there are no photographs of him, and if he ever wrote letters home, they no longer exist. So most of what we see of Inman in the novel is imagined by Frazier.
Frazier's other source of inspiration for the novel was The Odyssey, Homer's account of Odysseus's adventures as he tried to make his way home from the Trojan War. The events in Cold Mountain are not intended to parallel the events in The Odyssey exactly; Frazier was more interested in the similarity between the two men's adventures and experiences, despite the fact that they were thousands of years apart.