Heathen Valley (1962) by Romulus Linney

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Heathen Valley (1962)

by Romulus Linney

Valle Crucis, North Carolina

North Carolina: 17/20

    Heathen Valley is a strange (certainly by the standards of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America) pick, a novel based on a true story about the Protestant mission in the North Carolina Appalachians,  founded by an Episcopalian bishop who went on to be the highest ranked protestant to convert to Roman Catholicism.  Heathen Valley is based on a true story.  The Bishop in question is Levi Silliman Ives.  Literary fiction about religion is so rare that the novelty value is often enough to keep me interested, such was the case here, as the eponymous Heathen Valley itself, which is presented as a part of America without organized religion of any kind.  So much of the United States was founded directly by religious participants that an America without religion almost seems impossible.  

  However, as Heathen Valley depicts, parts of the Appalachians were founded without sanction from secular or religious authorities, leaving its residents without an organized religious presence.