Hatteras Light [Paperback]

Philip Gerard (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

First novelist Gerard obviously has great affection for the lore of the seafaring people of Hatteras Island off the coast of North Carolina, but this historical fiction about lighthouse keepers and sailors threatened by a German U-boat toward the end of World War I is just a mediocre sea adventure whose passionate figures are like watered-down Thomas Hardy characters. After an initial sighting, dismissed as improbable by the villagers, the insular Hatteras community is shocked by the sinking of an American ship by the German vessel. Readers must believe that a small naval craft is the only ship President Wilson's entire armed forces would spare to challenge an enemy submarine operating just yards from the American shore. Between the first encounter and the final face-off with the U-boat, a sailor and his son drift unrescued in a disabled fishing boat, romances criss-cross, and the islanders resent the Yankee skipper of the submarine chaser. Perhaps this work could have been sharpened into a boy's adventure.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In the late spring of 1918 a prowling U-boat makes the always treacherous waters off Hatteras Island even more dangerous. Its presence creates a crisis among the lighthouse keepers, lifesaving crews, and fishing families who inhabit the island. The Navy can provide them with little help, and if they are to rid their shores of this strange new menace the Hatteras folk may have to betray the very values that give their lives meaning. With its refreshingly different setting and its provocative moral questions, this first novel succeeds admirably as a tale of wartime adventure. Unfortunately, it flounders somewhat when its author tries too hard to make it also a social commentary about the forces that bind both families and communities together. Nevertheless, a worthwhile purchase and worth recommending to readers of nautical and/or adventure stories. Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: John F. Blair Publisher; 1st pbk. ed edition (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0895871661
• ISBN-13: 978-0895871664
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,158,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"I believe in the writer as a witness to evil, as a reporter of injustice, as a chronicler of human compassion, even on occasion of greatness, as one whose skills illuminate the Truth with a capital T, without irony. I believe it is the job of the writer to put into words what is worst - and also what is best - about us. To light up our possibilities, discover the finest lives to which we can aspire, and to inspire our readers to greatness of soul and heart."
________________________________________
Pocket Biography
Philip Gerard was born in 1955 and grew up in Newark, Delaware. He attended St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware. At the University of Delaware, he earned a B.A. in English and Anthropology, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. After college he lived in Burlington, Vermont, writing freelance articles, before returning to newspaper work in Delaware and then going west to study fiction writing at the University of Arizona writers workshop. He earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1981 and almost immediately joined the faculty at Arizona State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor and later as Writer in Residence. He remained at ASU until 1986, then taught for a brief time at Lake Forest College in Illinois before migrating to coastal North Carolina.
Gerard has published fiction and nonfiction in numerous magazines, including New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction, Hawai'i Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, New Letters, Arts & Letters, Fourth Genre, and The World & I. He is the author of three novels: Hatteras Light (Scribners 1986; Blair/ Salem paper 1997, nominated for the Ernest Hemingway Prize), Cape Fear Rising (Blair 1994), Desert Kill (William Morrow 1994; Piatkus in U.K. 1994); and four books of nonfiction, including Brilliant Passage. . . a schooning memoir (Mystic 1989) and Creative Nonfiction-- Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life (Story Press 1996), which was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month and Quality Paperback Book Clubs. Maryanne Culpepper, director of story development for National Geographic Television, writes, "It is the manual for nonfiction storytellers. . . Creative Nonfiction is on every bookcase at National Geographic Television."
He has written nine half-hour shows for Globe Watch, an international affairs program, for PBS-affiliate WUNC-TV, Chapel Hill, N.C. , and international broadcast, and scripted two hour-long environmental documentaries, one of which, "RiverRun- down the Cape Fear to the Sea," won a Silver Reel of Merit from the International Television Association in 1994. Two of his weekly radio essays have been broadcast on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."
Gerard's Writing a Book that Makes a Difference (Story Press, 2000), combines his dual passions of writing and teaching. His latest book of nonfiction Secret Soldiers (Dutton 2002; Plume softcover 2004) tells the story of an unlikely band of heroes in World War II: artists who fought the Nazis by creating elaborate scenarios of deception, conjuring phantom armored divisions out of sound effects, radio scripts, pyrotechnics, and inflatable tanks. River Run: Adventuring Through History,Nature, and Politics Down the Cape Fear to the Sea is forthcoming from UNC Press.

He teaches in the BFA and MFA Programs of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, which he chairs. He has won the Faculty Scholarship Award, the College of Arts & Science Teaching Award, the Chancellor's Medal for Excellence in Teaching, the Graduate Mentor Award, the Board of Trustees Teaching Award, and a Distinguished Teaching Professorship, and the Faculty Excellence Award given by the MFA students. The Philip Gerard Fellowship, endowed by benefactor Charles F. Green III to honor Gerard's work in establishing and directing the MFA program, is awarded annually to an MFA student on the basis of literary merit. Gerard has also been writer in residence at Bradford (MA) College and Old Dominion University (VA), has taught at the Sand Hills and Bread Loaf Writers Conferences, and has conducted workshops at the Chautauqua Institution , the Wildacres Summer Writers Retreat, and the Goucher College summer residency MFA program in Creative Nonfiction.
In keeping with his conviction that writers should give something back to their profession, he has served on the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network and from 1995-98 on the Board of Directors of the Associated Writing Programs, for two of those years as President. He has been appointed by Governor Bev Perdue to a second three-year term on the North Carolina Arts Council.

Look for his new book of narrative essays, The Patron Saint of Dreams, from Hub City Press in Spring 2012.