Published in 1999 by Gnomon Press

In The Balm of Gilead Tree, acclaimed author and poet Robert Morgan presents a masterful collection of seventeen short stories—ten new and seven selected from earlier volumes—that illuminate the lives of working-class people in the American South, particularly in the Appalachian region. With lyrical precision and deep empathy, Morgan explores themes of hardship, resilience, and transformation across generations.

From the haunting historical imagination of “The Tracks of Chief de Soto” to the visceral immediacy of “The Ratchet,” where a truck driver faces a terrifying descent with failed brakes, Morgan’s stories are rich in sensory detail and emotional depth. Characters grapple with environmental peril, economic uncertainty, and the quiet dramas of rural life, all rendered with Morgan’s signature clarity and reverence for the natural world.

This collection affirms Morgan’s place as a vital voice in Southern literature, offering readers both the balm of storytelling and the grit of lived experience.

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) was a colossus of twentieth-century American art, achieving a degree of authority almost unimaginable for a critic today. For more than thirty years he was both lionized as a proponent of formalism and criticized for his perceived dogmatism. In the postwar period Greenberg used his position of influence to advocate the importance of abstract expressionism and color-field painting and to establish the careers of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning. With the coming of pop art, performance and conceptual art, and postmodernism, however, Greenberg found his position increasingly challenged.

Edited with an introduction by critic Robert C. Morgan, Clement Greenberg, Late Writings is the first collection from the period 1970 to 1990, and the only comprehensive resource for Greenberg’s thought during the last third of his life. While earlier works have covered Greenberg’s early and middle career, this volume spans his mature period, during which he reevaluates and refines many of his earlier tenets in some of his most carefully crafted and engaging work. Exploring a surprising breadth of issues and mediums and demonstrating a depth of aesthetic and philosophical insights, in these relatively unknown works Greenberg incites a new direction for modernism beyond the twentieth century.

This essential volume includes five interviews from the end of his life in which Greenberg revisits some of the concerns of his formative years, illuminating the progression of his thought. Late Writings is an integral resource as issues of quality and significance in the dynamic world of art continue to be redefined.

Clement Greenberg was the most influential art critic of the postwar period. He was the author of numerous books, and his essays appeared in art magazines as well as such publications as Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Nation.

Robert C. Morgan is the author of The End of the Art World and of a monograph on the optical painter Vasarely. In addition to his work as a critic, artist, art historian, and curator, he is visiting professor of art at Hunter College in New York City.

Published in 1979 by Gnomon Press

In Groundwork, Robert Morgan offers a vivid poetic excavation of Appalachian life, memory, and landscape. Drawing deeply from his upbringing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Morgan crafts a collection that is both intimate and elemental. These poems explore the textures of rural existence—its labor, rituals, and natural rhythms—through language that is spare, musical, and richly evocative.

Morgan’s verse is rooted in place, yet it transcends regionalism through its mythic resonance and emotional clarity. He sifts through family lore, childhood recollections, and local history to recover what he calls “pieces of the morgenland”—a personal and cultural terrain shaped by hardship, resilience, and wonder. The poems in Groundwork are populated by grandparents, farmers, and mountain folk, rendered with a quiet reverence that elevates the everyday to the numinous.

This collection marks a foundational moment in Morgan’s career, establishing the poetic voice that would inform his later fiction and nonfiction. With titles like “Mountain Bride,” “Burning the Hornet’s Nest,” and “Baptism of Fire,” the poems evoke both the physical and spiritual dimensions of Appalachian life. Groundwork remains one of Morgan’s most concentrated and enduring tributes to the Southern mountains and their people.

Essential for readers of American poetry, Appalachian studies, and environmental literature, Groundwork is a lyrical testament to the power of memory and place.

Included in these eighteen essays by Cone are his never-before-published essay, "The World of Opera and Its Inhabitants," the unabridged version of "Music: A View from Delft," an introduction to this collection by the author himself, and a complete bibliography of his published writings.

"This selection of [Cone's] writings includes all the most incandescent and influential articles. We should have had such a book long ago."—Joseph Kerman, University of California at Berkeley

Winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for 1990