Author wrote of rural Vermont
Howard Frank Mosher, a Vermont writer best known for his novels about life in the state’s rural Northeast Kingdom has died. He was 74.
Mr. Mosher’s wife, Phyllis, announced on her husband’s Facebook page that he died Sunday morning at his home in Irasburg. The writer had announced last week that he had cancer and was in hospice care.
Mr. Mosher and his wife moved to northeastern Vermont in 1964 after getting out of college. They initially planned to stay for a year or two, but they never left.
“What we found in the Northeast Kingdom was just a gold mine of stories that no writer had ever told before, and I prettymuch dedicated my life to telling them,” Mr. Mosher told Vermont Public Radio in a 2010 interview.
He reimagined the hardscrabble region by creating a fictional location known as Kingdom County.
“I don’t merely view him as a voice for Vermont,” Chris Bohjalian, a Vermont author, told the Burlington Free Press. “I view him as a beautiful stylist who found the universalities of the human condition in the idiosyncrasies of Vermont.”
Mr. Mosher’s novels include “Where the Rivers FlowNorth,” “Disappearances” and “A Stranger in the Kingdom.” He won a Guggenheim Fellowship andwas recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mr. Mosher was awarded the $ 10,000 Herb Lockwood Prize on Friday — several months early due to his condition. It honors individuals who achieve great art and urge others to do the same.
Several of Mr. Mosher’s novels have been adapted into movies.