“The Truest Pleasure” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995) reads as naturally as if it were an autobiography. "Like a fireside chat," writes one reviewer in Southern Living magazine. But it took six manuscripts to get it right, says award-winning poet and novelist Robert Morgan of his latest work.

"I first wrote it as a novella in 1980," said Morgan, the Kappa Alpha Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University. "I rewrote it in the mid-80s, and again as a full novel in 1991. Then I wrote it three times as a novel: once in the third person, once in heavy dialect and once in first-person standard English, roughing up the language a bit."

The result is a book that Publisher's Weekly voted as one of the best of 1995 and that is already in its second printing. Set in Appalachia at the turn of the century, The Truest Pleasure tells of Ginny, a farmer's wife in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, who grows increasingly estranged from her husband. Like most newlyweds, they start out happy. Tom, who lost his family in the Civil War, gains a new lease on farm life by marrying Ginny, whose family and farm have survived. The couple share a passion for farming - - and for lovemaking, which makes Ginny think of "tomatoes in the sun and fresh chips from chopped oak." But marital bliss begins to dissolve when Ginny starts attending Pentecostal revival meetings. Tom is embarrassed by his wife's rapturous displays of devotion; when he sees her dancing, shouting and speaking in tongues at a revival, he is "shocked and scared" and vows never to return.

"The next day, we was both still mad," Ginny says. "Our sulks and snits before had been little things. They didn't amount to more than bee stings that end up itching. What happened now was cold venom rushing in us and pouring over everything."

Rooted in reality

It is appropriate that The Truest Pleasure is sized like a photograph. While it contains no actual photographs, the five-by-seven-inch book is filled with literary snapshots of the author's past. Morgan was born in Hendersonville, N.C., in 1944 and raised on a small farm in the community of Green River. "It was truly rural, and somewhat isolated," he said. "We didn't have a car or truck or tractor; in fact, we didn't even own a horse." His mother was a reserved Baptist, his father a "holy roller" in the Pentecostal Church. In a Dec. 18, 1995, broadcast of "Fresh Air" on National Public Radio, Morgan described his reaction when he first saw his father speaking in tongues:

"It was terrifying; I was not able to write about that sort of experience until I was almost 40. It was language out of control. I felt as though I was in touch with something very different from any language I had ever experienced. I think I was both attracted and repelled."

For Morgan himself, the epiphany came at the age of 14 when he borrowed War and Peace from the Henderson County bookmobile.

"As soon as I got home and began reading, I knew this was a different kind of book," he wrote in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. "The more I read, the more I wanted to read. I had to force myself to stop to go shell corn for the chickens and to bring the cows in from the pasture. I would snatch odd moments just to savor a few more paragraphs. On weekends I hoped for rain, and while sitting in church kept thinking about Pierre and Natasha, the Prince and the Rostovs."

A writer "almost by accident"

Still, when Morgan went to college it was for science, not literature. Like many young Americans in the wake of Sputnik, he studied engineering and applied mathematics -- first at Emory College in Oxford, Ga., and later at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. "Almost by accident," he said, he took a course in creative writing there with an inspiring and supportive instructor and has been "pretty much writing since that time." He received a master of fine arts degree from North Carolina State University at Greensboro in 1968.

"After my year at N.C. State, there were still Russians I wanted to beat," he wrote in the autobiography series. "But they now had names like Tolstoy and Chekhov and Pasternak." Morgan, who has taught at Cornell since 1971, has published nine volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and, with The Truest Pleasure, two novels -- all set in the mountains of rural North Carolina. He has been recognized for the work with the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize, North Carolina Award in Literature and Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

Though known as a writer, Morgan -- who can describe Civil War clashes and characters as if he'd witnessed them firsthand -- often sounds more like a historian of the American South. That may be because he grew up hearing about them from people who had: his great-grandfather fought in the Confederate Army, and his great-grandmother could remember General Sherman marching through South Carolina.

But he never felt compelled to write about the South until he left it.

"It just came to me, particularly after I moved up here," Morgan said. "I knew the stories; I knew the place. Somehow, when I was 800 miles away from it, it seemed more interesting, more intense, to recreate the sights and sounds. We don't have katydids in Ithaca; but from August through early October [in the Blue Ridge], the mountains are loud with the sound of katydids every night. I would sit on the porch and try to recreate this sound."

That porch is on Morgan's 1830s farmhouse in Freeville, N.Y., where, he said, the landscape reminds him of Henderson County. "I tell people that I moved to northern Appalachia," he said.

Now, Morgan is interested in writing about upstate New York. If the Cornell community is lucky, he won't feel he must leave the area to set it down in words.