Meet the Author & Curator: Scott Huler's "A Delicious Country"

100 East Mountain Street, PO Box 552,Kings Mountain NC 28086

09 September, 2023

Description

In 1700, explorer John Lawson left “Charles-Town,” then the only settlement of any size in the Carolina colony, for a walk into the backcountry, "being six English-men in Company, with three Indian-men, and one Woman.” Two months and almost 600 miles later he emerged in what North Carolinians today would call Little Washington, with stories to tell. He put the stories in “A New Voyage to Carolina" in 1709, and it became a best-seller, helping populate the Carolina colony. Three hundred fourteen years later, writer Scott Huler, seeking descriptions of early Carolina, read Lawson’s book. He went looking for a book that connected what Lawson saw with present-day Carolina. That book did not exist, so Huler, like Lawson, took a walk, with the goal of comparing what Lawson saw with what he saw. His walk took a year, and it too yielded stories. Those stories constitute “A Delicious Country,” an account of his own walk and a comparison with Lawson’s. Like Lawson, Huler described flora and fauna, geography and ecosystem, settlement and culture. Lawson sent his botanical specimens to the British Museum. Huler’s specimens — from plants to rocks, from beer cans to arrows — have been gathered into an exhibit that has been shown in Raleigh and Charlotte and now comes to Kings Mountain. Bio: Scott Huler is the author of seven books of nonfiction, including A Delicious Country, the book resulting from this project. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as Backpacker, Fortune, and ESPN. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books have been translated into five languages. He was 2011 Piedmont Laureate in Creative nonfiction and a 2002-2003 Knight-Wallace Fellow at Michigan. For the Lawson project he was a 2014-2015 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Currently senior writer at Duke Magazine, he lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.