Howard Frank Mosher and the Classics

<p> Howard Frank Mosher has spent the greater part of his career depicting a relatively isolated section of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom. Yet even as he writes about that particular area in the Green Mountain State he is investigating age-old themes from among the best English and American literary works. His first novel <I>Disappearances</I> (1977) signaled the arrival of a master craftsman harkening us back to Melville's <I>Billy Budd</I> and <I>Moby-Dick</I> in terms of humankind's struggle against an ever present evil.</p><p> A full 33 years after the publication of his first novel the Vermont author in <I>Walking to Gatlinburg</I> (2010) examined the polarity between cowardice and honor. In the intervening years between <I>Disappearances</I> and <I>Gatlinburg</I> Mosher explored crucial matters such as the disappearing wilderness industrialization black male/white female encounters the necessity of humor the quest for salvation and the immortality of romantic love all issues that he delved into as he staked out a unique terrain within the pantheon of Bunyan Shakespeare Dreiser Twain Faulkner Steinbeck Harper Lee and others.</p>