Newdick's Season of Frost Book

I didn't read this entire book, but I read the first 143 pages that comprise the biography of Reece, the farmer poet who lived not far from our mountain cabin. This is a sad story, indeed. Reece was born into a poor farming family on Wolf Creek, in a house that now lies under the lake at Vogel State Park in north GA. His family "legacy" was to be a dirt poor farmer (he used his first royalty to buy a tire for his 16 year old Ford truck), take care of his parents who both had TB, and write lyrical ballads that no one wanted to pay to read. Reece was lauded by the critics and traveled around the country trotting out his poems for women's groups and other swells; evidently, there was no money in that, either, because he never made enough to support himself either by writing or by teaching -- he taught a semester at UCLA and later at North Georgia College in Young Harris. Reece was obviously a talented man, but what a tragic story. He never married because he lived in the hollow with his parents and never met women since he was keeping farmer's hours; later he decided not to marry because he became infected with TB. Reece ended up shooting himself in his infected lung in the same room at the college where an early teacher and mentor committed suicide. If you would like to understand how hard mountain life was during the Great Depression, this is your book. You can also visit the Reece Farm and Heritage Site (for free) if you're in the area south of Blairsville. The second part of this book is a collection of some of Reece's poems. Many of them are based on Biblical stories/themes and will read like the Dead Sea Scrolls for most of us today.