The Land Breakers

First published fifty years ago in 1964 to great acclaim, The Land Breakers is John Ehle’s best-known work of historical fiction, chronicling the hard-won settlement of southern Appalachia. A cinematic saga spanning the Revolutionary War years of 1779 to 1784, The Land Breakers recounts in spare, unflinching prose the challenges, setbacks, and small triumphs of the defiant men and women who were drawn to the wilderness of provincial North Carolina.

Eager for opportunity in a land where the easy country had been claimed, Ehle’s unforgettable characters stake their lives on the settlement of the unnamed high mountain territory. Strong and silent Mooney Wright is the first to make his way into the forbidding mountains. Others steadily follow- the cruel patriarch Tinkler Harrison, his daughter Lorry, the free-spirited Mina Plover. The Land Breakers is a paean to man’s capacity for work, and Ehle imbues the hardworking men and women of his book-the land breakers of this young country-with nobility.