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Gurney Norman
Gurney Norman was born in 1937 in Grundy, Virginia, and grew up near Hazard, Kentucky. He studied journalism at the University of Kentucky and received a Wallace Stegner fellowship to attend graduate school at Stanford University in California. There, his classmates included Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry.
After Norman left Stanford, he spent two years in the army stationed in Fort Ord, California. He moved back to Hazard in 1964, where he worked for a year as the editor of the Hazard Herald. In Kentucky, Norman began developing the short stories that would eventually become Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories. Later, while living in California, Norman published his first novel, Divine Right's Trip, in the pages of the last Whole Earth Catalog, which he edited in the late 1960s.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Norman focused on documentary filmmaking. Among his critically acclaimed documentaries is Wilderness Road, which at its initial broadcast drew the largest audience in the history of Kentucky Educational Television.
In recent years, Norman has returned to fiction. He is currently working on two novels, including a novel about mountain man Daniel Boone and Crazy Quilt, which continues the story of the family in Kinfolks.
Norman also upholds and promotes Appalachian culture, mentoring students interested in the region. In 1996 Norman was honored as a fiction writer, filmmaker, and cultural advocate by being chosen as the subject of the Fifteenth Annual Emory and Henry Literary Festival, which celebrates significant writers in the region. Currently, he teaches creative writing courses at the University of Kentucky and lives in Lexington.
The Stories | The Author | The Filmmaker | The Cast | Resources | ITVS
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