For six decades, Robert Morgan has been a preeminent voice in southern Appalachian literature. Growing up in Green River, North Carolina, in the 1950s, he absorbed a variety of influences to inform his later work: his family's haunting stories, explorations of the mountainous landscape, paperbacks from a bookmobile, lessons from a kind elementary school teacher. Decades later, his acclaimed writing resulted in a fifty-one-year career at Cornell University, a plethora of literary awards, and a place on the New York Times bestseller list. The essays collected in this volume reveal the ways Morgan writes about literature with the same reverence he uses to describe his homeplace.

The Dead, Alive, and Busy is a collection of essays on the author's personal history, masters of prose, and significant poets. Morgan's catalogue of literary interests is a melting pot of global traditions, from Leo Tolstoy to Appalachian writers such as Thomas Wolfe and Wilma Dykeman. His analysis covers writers "in a community across time"—including Poe, Hemingway, McCarthy, Carl Sandburg, and the Appalachian poets Jeff Daniel Marion and Jim Wayne Miller. Akin to his own description of Bierstadt's paintings, Morgan's writing throughout reflects "intimacy more than spectacle."