AI finder
中
Tar Heel Tales cover

Tar Heel Tales

Bryant, H. E. C. (Henry Edward Cowan), 1873-1967Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.8
Word count
205K words
Chapters
21
Report an error Find this book

Tags

English Originals Folk Literature Country LifeLocal GazetteerCharacter SketchDaily ReflectionsLocal NarrativeHumor ReliefDialect UsageFolktalesFolkloreAmerican South

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Tar Heel Tales by H. E. C. Bryant. Author: Bryant, H. E. C. (Henry Edward Cowan), 1873-1967. Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Apr 1, 2017

Editor's review

Tar Heel Tales is a collection of short stories by H. E. C. Bryant set in North Carolina, whose residents are known as "Tar Heels." The stories draw largely on local characters, dialect, and everyday experience; the style is plain and carries the flavor of oral tradition, so that the reader can feel the tone and rhythm of early twentieth-century rural Southern society in America. Its value lies not in complex plots but in its preservation of local color: dialect expressions, details of daily life, and human relationships together form a concrete picture of local life. For readers studying American regional literature or interested in Southern culture, it is a light but reliable text; for general readers, it works better as casual reading for understanding regional narrative. The Project Gutenberg edition is in the English public domain, making it easy to look up characters and place names.

Who it's for

A good fit for

  • Readers interested in Southern American culture and regional literature
  • English-language readers who enjoy short stories and prefer light reading
  • Literature enthusiasts studying local color writing and dialect narrative
  • Learners who need English public-domain short texts for reading practice

Not a good fit for

  • Readers who prefer strong plots and fast-paced narrative
  • Readers who need systematic historical analysis or social research data
  • Readers with weak English who find extensive dialect expressions difficult

Reading tips

  1. Read each story independently and pause briefly after each one, noting dialect and the narrator's tone
  2. Prepare a list of place names and personal names to help connect the different stories
  3. When encountering dialect spellings, first reconstruct them by sound and then use context; there is no need to verify every word
  4. Choose one or two stories to read aloud and feel how oral tradition affects sentence rhythm

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21

FAQ

What does "Tar Heel" mean?
"Tar Heel" is a common nickname for residents of North Carolina, and most of the stories in the book are set in that state. Knowing this helps orient the stories geographically, but there is no need to dig into the etymology; understanding it simply as "North Carolinian" is enough to enter the text smoothly.
Do these stories have a continuous plot?
The pieces are relatively independent, more like a collection of local characters and episodes from life than a continuous long narrative. You can start with any story and need not read them in order. To get a sense of the overall atmosphere, it is best to read two or three in a row and feel the shared regional tone and narrative habits.
Will too much dialect make it hard to understand?
The book does contain dialect spellings and colloquial expressions, which may feel unfamiliar at first, but most can be reconstructed from sound and context. It is best to read a passage through first to grasp the general meaning, then go back to individual words and sentences, so as not to lose the rhythm of reading by pondering every word.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Bryant, H. E. C. (Henry Edward Cowan), 1873-1967 Author

H. E. C. Bryant (Henry Edward Cowan Bryant, 1873–1967) is an author whose life and identity are sparsely documented in publicly available sources; his nationality, education, and career cannot be reliably established. What is known is that he left one work, Tar Heel Tales, the only title by him held in this collection. "Tar Heel" is a common nickname for residents of North Carolina, so the book appears to be a collection of narratives about the people, places, and folk anecdotes of that state, with a distinctly regional flavor. Given the limited material, his writing style and influence cannot be described in detail; it can only be confirmed that he survives in bibliographic records through this single work.

Top rated in the same category

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67 cover
5.0
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67 Ludwig van Beethoven
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy cover
5.0
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx, Karl, 1818-1883
Ethics cover
5.0
Ethics Benedictus de Spinoza
Shakespeare's First Folio cover
5.0
Shakespeare's First Folio William Shakespeare