CityView Magazine

CityViewNC.com | 55 Piggy Bank: A Book about Money, Budgeting, Entrepreneurship, and Persistence" to help her own daughter learn the value of money management. is delightfully illustrated book teaches kids healthy money habits and the value of setting goals and working to attain them. She has also made presentations to schoolchildren, teaching the core money principles of sharing, spending and saving at a level children can understand and practice. 5. Born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917, CARSON MCCULLERS moved to New York in 1934 when she was 17, where she began studying creative writing. Aer her marriage to Reeves McCullers in 1937, they moved to Fayetteville and rented an apartment in the Cool Spring Tavern downtown. Here she completed "e Heart is a Lonely Hunter," which is considered one of the "Top 100 Books" by numerous reviewers. e theme throughout McCullers' novels is oen a variation of the "lonely heart" – tales of loneliness and isolation. She portrays her characters in sharp detail and, although many are strange, eccentric, and oen damaged in some way, she manages to make them sympathetic to the reader. Critics have ranked McCullers with other Southern writers like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor. Several of her books were made into Hollywood movies. "e Heart is a Lonely Hunter" (1968) starred Alan Arkin, who was nominated for an Oscar (he won Best Actor in a Supporting Role in the 2006 "Little Miss Sunshine"). 6. Born to free parents in 1858, CHARLES W. CHESNUTT grew up during Reconstruction in Fayetteville, where he attended the Howard School, the forerunner of Fayetteville State University. Although he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1878, his experiences in Fayetteville provided material for his novels and short stories. Writing at the beginning of the Jim Crow era, his themes include racial identity, color and class prejudice, and the oen violent suppression of the rights and personal freedoms of African Americans. In his first novel, "e House Behind the Cedars," most of the action takes place in a sleepy Southern town called Patesville, a thinly-disguised Fayetteville. Siblings John Warwick and Rena Walden are of mixed heritage and light-skinned enough to pass as white. John accomplishes this successfully and convinces Rena to do the same but for her it has tragic consequences. His next novel, "e Marrow of Tradition" (1901) is a fictional account of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in North Carolina. It relives the horror of that event, in which a mob of 2,000 white supremacists overthrew the elected black government officials in Wilmington and destroyed black businesses and property and killed upward of 300 Black citizens. Fayetteville has figured prominently in the novels of two of America's most famous authors. e lesson for our current, aspiring authors is that through hard work and perseverance, they too can become writers of some note. Diane Parfitt can be contacted at citycentergallerybooks@gmail.com. RUSTIC ELEGANCE SOUTHERN CHARM V i s i t T H E Ca B A R N. c o m a n d b o o k y o u r t o u r , t o d a y . Photo credits: Chelsea Allegra Photography & Morgan Caddell Photography Spring Lake, North Carolina

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