About the Author: Jory Sherman
Pulitzer Prize nominee Jory Sherman is one of America's most talented individuals. He is an accomplished artist. He first gained fame and recognition across the country as a leading force of the beat poet generation during the turbulent days of the 1960s. He has published more than a thousand magazine articles and five hundred short stories. And Jory Sherman, with a writing career that has spanned five decades, is renowned and respected as a prolific novelist. His nomination for the Pulitzer Prize came from his classic novel, The Grass Kingdom.
Warren French, a professor of Literature at the University of Florida, noted: "Jory Sherman has a strange and powerful knowledge of language and an almost perfect ear."
Sherman actually began writing at age eight when he was grief stricken over the death of his puppy, Doopers. He read James Joyce's Ulysses two years later and fell in love with language and mythology. His professional writing career began as a poet in San Francisco.
Sherman has published more than three hundred books for such publishers as Doubleday, Zebra, Avon, Berkley, Walker & Co., Tor, Forge, Pinnacle, and Bantam. He has created and packaged book series for Avon, Harlequin, Gold Eagle, Pinnacle, Paperjacks, Zebra, and Bantam.
He presently lives in Pittsburg, Texas, on Lake Bob Sandlin. He points out: "I think self-discipline is a big factor when it comes to success as a writer, so I write just about every day. When I'm not writing, I'm reading or I'm thinking about writing. I have no life. When drafting, I try to write at least ten pages a day. I try not to go back and edit until I have fifty pages to work with. I'm very aware of the passage of time. I could easily spend two years crafting a book, but I don't have that luxury. As a result, it takes me about nine months from start to deadline to finish a book."
Jory Sherman's first book for Gallivant Press, The Hills of Eden, is a deeply personal look at the green highlands of Missouri and Arkansas. His work could easily be described as a travel book. He does lead the reader down beautiful and poignant mountain highways and long-forgotten back roads to places that reflect the timeless legacy and unforgettable characters of the Ozarks.
As he has written: "All the dirt roads lead somewhere, and I have followed many of them since that first morning, a wanderer and an explorer, never expecting anything but always finding something of great value, whether it be a diamond-strewn creek in sunlight or a midnight river full of dancing stars, or a verdant woodland glade."
Or maybe it's a memoir of the time Sherman spent in the highlands, the time, he says, that was both mystical and magical "as if the green spring hills were being born at just that moment, as if they had lain dormant beneath a low sky full of heavy clouds, waiting for that first kiss of sunlight, waiting for me."
He has written: "These green hills and memory percolates up through the thick layers of civilization in my mind ... The hills that first morning arose out of a thick mist like some Brigadoon stage set that appears only once in a span of years, then disappears until another generation spawns."
Others may prefer to use The Hills of Eden as a devotional because the power and the passion of his writing, the depth of his insights, the raw energy of his thoughts are stimulating, motivational, and inspiring. His words, his stories, those he met within the highlands remain firmly implanted in your mind long after the final pages have been read.
As Jory Sherman remembers: "I discovered long ago that it's not the things that last. It's not the things we see and touch which endure in reality, but the images of those things that are important to us, that seem to mirror memories in the soul. The images are those intangibles that we can summon from some deep place inside us and relive and enjoy again and again, though we be far from home, far from the hills and hollows that we have journeyed through to find our own truths, our own personal mythology."
As reviewer Lee Kirk wrote: "This is the sort of book that may be pulled down again and again on those days when you're feeling blue, or when you're somewhere else and need to smell and feel the Ozarks one more time."
