Sidney Lanier spent the spring and summer of 1881 going from place to place in what turned out to be a losing race against his fatal tuberculosis. He stopped for brief periods in nearby Asheville and Fletcher while looking for a climate that would ease his suffering, but Lynn is where the search ended. Lanier died in Lynn on September 7, 1881, in the old Wilcox House on Route 108. The red-brick house is privately owned but can be seen easily from the road. Lanier also stayed at the nearby Mimosa Inn. Learn more ...

Margaret Culkin Banning, the novelist and short story writer, died at Friendly Hills, her home in Tryon, on January 4, 1982. Banning completed her last published novel, Such Interesting People (1979), while living at Friendly Hills, and was at work on a novel before she died. Learn more ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in 1935, a time of despair for him, came to Tryon to be near his wife, Zelda, who was hospitalized in Asheville. Fitzgerald was in finanical difficulties, and the reception of Tender Is The Night (1934) had not lived up to his expectations. While living in Tryon, Fitzgerald worked on short stories and on the autobiographical essay "The Crack-Up," published in 1936 in Esquire. Fitzgerald returned to Tryon once more, in January 1937, while waiting to be offered a screenwriting job in Hollywood. He ate often at Misseldines Drug Store in Tryon, and wrote a paeon to it, making the institution one of the few drug stores so honored:

Oh Misseldines, dear Misseldines,
A dive we'll ne'er forget,
The taste of its banana splits
Is on our tonsils yet.

The Oak Hall Hotel at 201 Chestnut Street, where Fitzgerald stayed, has been demolished. Learn more ...

William Gillette was another writer to visit Tryon, whose most popular work in his own day was Sherlock Holmes (1899), a dramatization of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Gillette stopped in Tryon in 1889, intending to go on to Asheville to recuperate from an illness. He decided to stay in Tryon and had a house build in a nearby pine forest. He boarded the house up in 1910 and never returned. After he sold the house in 1925, it was converted into the Thousand Pines Inn. The building is now a private residence. Learn more ...

Dubose Heyward of Charleston, South Carolina, spent summers in Hendersonville at a house called Dawn Hill, on Price Road off Old Kanuga Road. But Heyward died in Tryon on June 16, 1940, while on a visit. The novelist had been staying in a house at 606 Glenwalden Circle, which is still privately owned. Heyward is best know for his novel Porgy (1925), which served as the basis for George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Learn more ...

The five references above are from the Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, by Eugene H. Ehrlich and Gorton Carruth, Oxford University Press, 1982.

Some other notable writers with Polk County Connections are mentioned in Sketches of Polk County History, by Sadie Smathers Patton, 1950:

Margaret Morley was a writer who made Tryon her base of operations not long after the turn of the century. Her book Carolina Mountains is still widely read, and is considered one of the best concerning this region. Learn more ...

Payne Erskine was the pen name of Mrs. Charles Erskine. Mrs. Erskine was a painter and author, who wrote The Mountain Girl and A Girl of the Blue Ridge and several other novels, published by Little, Brown & Co. [Read When the Gates Lift Up Their Heads, an electronic edition] The Erskines were visited around 1899 by a Chicago author, Elia W. Peattie, [Read short stories by Peattie] and her youngest child, Donald Culross Peattie. [Learn more ... ]This was the beginning of a long association of the Peattie family with Polk County. Both mother and son are still considered authors of note today. The Illinois State Library "Illinois Authors" webpage adds the following information about the Peatties:

Donald Culross Peattie was an author, editor and naturalist, and was born in Chicago. He was also an editor for the Reader's Digest. Learn more ...

Notable Writings:

Up Country, 1928
Green Laurels: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists, 1936
A Book of Hours, 1937
The Road of a Naturalist, 1937
A Prairie Grove, 1938
Lives of Destiny, 1954

Elia W. Peattie, mother of naturalist Donald Culross Peattie, is noted for her novels. She was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, beginning in 1884, and was literary editor there from 1901 to 1917. Learn more ...

Notable Writings:

The Precipice, 1914 [e-book]
Lotta Embary's Career, 1915
The Newcomers, 1916
Sarah Brewster's Relatives, 1916

Finally, this list would not be complete without mentioning Jean Hersey:

Jean Hersey was born and brought up in New York City. She lived in Connecticut and Pennsylvania before moving permanently to Tryon. Jean Hersey had a distinguished writing career on the following subjects: gardening, the art of living, philosophy, and country living. A frequent contributor to magazines, she published many books, some of which are Carefree Gardening, The Woman's Day Book of Wildflowers, The Shape of a Year, and These Rich Years.