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Author. Screenwriter. Playwright. Historian. Genealogist. Bon vivant boulevardier. Newspaper columnist. To browse the several hundred books Perry Deane Young has for sale on Amazon.com, go to: http://www.amazon.com/shops/woodfinson Interact with Perry on his blog: http://perryyoung.blogspot.com Recent interviews & articles
World premiere of a new play by William Gregg and Perry Deane Young July 29-August 9, 2009 at the historic Owens Theater, Mars Hill, N.C. In fact, the author Thomas Wolfe returned to his native Asheville, N.C., in September 1929 just days before his locally-explosive novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was published in New York. He would visit all those who later felt he had betrayed and ridiculed them in his widely praised novel. And then he went back to New York City and never returned to his beloved home town and the people there until eight years had passed. A wildly passionate man, Wolfe was caught in a web of loyalties that first involved his devotion to his art. Next was his love of the great stage designer, Aline Bernstein And always hovering in his memory was his devoted but needy family back in Asheville. When the school teacher who had molded him as an intellectual and a writer read what Wolfe had written about her husband, she wrote him: “You have devastated your own family but you have crucified mine.” His sister was shunned by the literary club she was desperate to belong to. His older brother threatened to sue because Wolfe said he had a piece of “tough suet” where his heart ought to be. But the publication of Look Homeward, Angel coincided almost to the day with the stock market crash in 1929 and Wolfe’s family like everybody else in Asheville was truly devastated. Ironically, the success of the hated novel enabled Wolfe to lend his family money when they needed it most. When Wolfe actually came home again in 1937, he stopped off in his mother’s ancestral homeland of mountain-bound Yancey County. He got off the bus and walked into a gunfight among some distant cousins. But, his welcome home in nearby Asheville was tumultuous. All the bad feelings had been forgotten and he was greeted like a returning sports hero. The peace and quiet he sought in a little cabin out from Asheville evaded him as hordes of visitors invaded his privacy to tell him their stories and party with the famous author. Wolfe fled back to the haven New York City had always offered him and plunged himself into his work, writing nearly 2 million words in less than a year. Leaving a mountainous manuscript with his publisher, he headed west on an extended vacation trip. From Seattle, Wolfe wired his family that he was hospitalized with a mysterious illness which was later diagnosed as tuberculosis of the brain. His family as always came to his aid, first his sister and then his brother and then his mother helped get him back to Baltimore for treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The famous author died there, surrounded by his devoted family. They brought him home to a celebrity’s farewell funeral. He was laid to rest in Riverside Cemetery among all those who once felt he betrayed them—and all their tombstones would eventually carry inscriptions from his writing. He was home again, home at last. William Gregg and Perry Deane Young both grew up in Wolfe’s literary shadow in the Asheville suburb of Woodfin. This is their third play. SART previously produced their plays, Frankie, and Mountain of Hope. Prior to coming home to Mars Hill, Gregg served as director of the New American Theater in Illinois, the Theatre Virginia in Richmond, the New Raft Theatre Company in New York City and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. At the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, he worked as production stage manager and assistant director for artistic director Liviu Ciulei. In addition to the three plays, Young is the author of 10 books and one screenplay. A new edition of his Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, has just been published by Press 53. Millenium Films has announced that production of the film based on the book will begin in 2009.  "Writer's Good Year Gets Better" www.newsobsever.com/news/story/1530682.html 
Perry Deane Young is the author of eight non-fiction books, two plays and one screenplay. His ninth book, Hanged by a Dream, was self-published in July of 2005. The monumental family history entitled, Our Young Family, was published in January 2004 by The Overmountain Press. It is a family history like none ever published before—with 15,000 names, hundreds of photographs and an array of stories, documents, legends and real-life dramas, including 13 murder stories. 
Perry Young’s first book was the widely praised Two of the Missing, a Vietnam memoir published in 1975 by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan hardback and Avon paperback. The David Kopay Story, which Young wrote with the gay pro football player, was published in 1977 by Arbor Hours hardback and Bantam paperback. The David Kopay Story was on the New York Times Bestseller list for nine weeks and was named one of the ten Best Books for Young Adults of 1977 by the American Library Association. 
God’s Bullies, Native Reflections on Preachers and Politics was published in 1982 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. A Killing Cure was published in 1985 by Henry Holt & Company. The Insider’s Guide to California was published in 1990 by Hunter Publishing Co. Lesbians and Gays and Sports, part of a series for young adults edited by the distinguished historian, Martin Duberman, was published in 1994 by Chelsea House. The Untold Story of Frankie Silver, Was She Unjustly Hanged?, was published in 1998 by Down Home Press. Two of the Missing is currently under option by Ralph Hemecker and Mythic Films. Hemecker was a director on the X-Files and Millenium television series and he was director and executive producer of the television series, Witch Blade. A new edition of The David Kopay Story was published in 2001 and it is currently optioned for a movie for television. 
In August of 2001, the world premiere of the play, Frankie, was presented at the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre at Mars Hill College, Mars Hill, N.C. The play was written by SART director, Bill Gregg, and Perry Deane Young and was based on Young’s book, The Untold Story of Frankie Silver. The play, Frankie, has now been published in book form and is available from the authors. [See Books.] A new play by Perry Young and Bill Gregg had its premiere July 7, 2004 at Mars Hill. This was Mountain of Hope, a drama based on the life and death of UNC Prof. Elisha Mitchell, for whom the highest mountain in eastern America is named.
Born March 27, 1941 on a farm in Woodfin, near Asheville, N.C., Young attended the University of North Carolina off and on from 1959-1965. As a student, he wrote 15 different articles for the New York Times Travel section. Articles he wrote for the Chapel Hill Weekly on the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society won him the first place award in the Hearst Foundation’s competition for college journalists that year. In 1993, Young returned to UNC-Chapel Hill and earned his B.A. in Mass Communications, with a minor in American history. From his student days, he worked on newspapers in Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, and Chapel Hill, N.C. He also worked for United Press International in Raleigh in 1963 and in New York in 1967. In January, 1968, he went to Vietnam on assignment for UPI, arriving in Saigon the night the Tet Offensive began. In 1970, he worked for the New York Post in New York and in Beirut and Cairo. Since 1970, Young has published articles in numerous national magazines and newspapers. These include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, Harper’s, Ms., Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Cosmopolitan, The Advocate, Washingtonian, Saturday Review, The Chicago Journalism Review, The Quill. A columnist for the Chapel Hill Herald and the Asheville Citizen-Times from 1996-2003, his articles now appear in The Independent and can be found in the archives at indyweek.com/durham/authors/perrydeaneyoung.html In 2005, Perry Deane Young presented all of his personal and professional papers from his long career as an author and journalist to the Southern Historical Collection of Manuscripts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A guide to the papers is available at www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/y/Young,Perry_Deane.html. Perry Deane Young is available to speak to school and civic groups on any of the many topics he has written about in his long career as a journalist, author and playwright. Michael Congdon Don Congdon Associates 156 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010-7002 Telephone: 212-645-1229 FAX: 212-727-2688 E-mail: dca@doncongdon.com HOME • COMMENTARY • BOOKS • PLAYS • CONTACT 
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