2 0 0 2 N O R T H C A R O L I N A A W A R D W I N N E R S
ROMULUS LINNEY -- LITERATURE
Romulus
Linney is a novelist, a teacher, a director, and a playwright of versatility
and intensity. He has been called “poet of America’s heartland”
for the plays he writes about the people of the Appalachian mountains.
For his unique talent as a master storyteller and playwright, Romulus
Linney receives the 2002 North Carolina Award for Literature.
Linney was born in 1930 in Philadelphia, where his father was a physician. During the early years of the Depression, the family moved to Boone in western North Carolina. Following the death of his father four years later, mother and son moved again, eventually settling in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio, Linney earned a master’s degree from Yale Drama School.
It was in 1962, while working as a stage manager at the Actors Studio in New York City, that his first novel, Heathen Valley, was published. The novel, which won a National Critics Award and which he later adapted for the stage, was based on the Valle Crucis Mission in Valle Crucis, N.C. Five years later, Linney’s first play was successfully produced. Since then, he has penned two more novels and over thirty plays, produced throughout the United States and abroad.
No matter how often
he moved as a child, memories of the mountains stayed with him. He saw
them as mysterious, beautiful and full of deep feeling. For years, he
returned to Boone each summer to “live the life and hear the voices
of Appalachia.” He also returned to Appalachia in many of his novels
and plays, recreating the people who live in the Southern highlands. With
what one critic has called a “cool, compassionate, unsentimental
eye,” he looks at these rural Southerners and sees “bones
beneath the skin” and “mysteries not easily analyzed.”
Linney’s plays have won two Obie Awards, two National Critic Awards,
and three Dramalogue Awards. He is the recipient of many fellowships,
including grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. In May,
he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which gave
him both its Award in Literature and its Award of Merit Medal for Drama.
He also is a member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild and the Fellowship
of Southern Writers. Six of his one-act plays have been named Best Short
Plays, and Time magazine selected his “Laughing Stock” as
one of the ten best plays of 1984. Other works include “A Lesson
Before Dying,” “Holy Ghosts,” and “The Sorrows
of Frederick.” Linney’s plays have been widely produced in
North Carolina and throughout the South.
He has taught at many universities, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wake Forest, Columbia and Princeton. He has been awarded honorary doctor of letters degrees from Oberlin College and Applachian State University.
He continues to visit Boone, where two cousins still live in the family home. Linney and his wife, Laura Callanan, live in New York City and Germantown, N.Y. Linney has two daughters: Susan, an author of children’s books, and Laura, an Emmy Award-winning actress. Now retired from teaching, Linney is working on a new play.