Clyde Edgerton

Clyde Edgerton is a North Carolina novelist, musician, artist, and teacher whose fiction often finds comedy inside family custom and regional speech. Raney, his first novel, follows a small-town Southern Baptist and her more liberal husband Charles, an Atlanta librarian, through the early tests of marriage. Algonquin Books originally published it in 1985. Raney narrates, allowing disagreements about faith, kinship, manners, and compromise to emerge through a voice both confident and capable of change. Edgerton later wrote Walking Across Egypt and other novels, and several of his books reached film. He also taught creative writing as a distinguished professor in Wilmington at North Carolina's public university. Raney already contains hallmarks of that wider career: an ear for spoken language, respect for imperfect communities, and music as a bridge between people who differ. Its humor never removes the seriousness of two partners learning to recognize one another as equals.