...Before the Storm: Songs of St. John and other Poems - Hardcover

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Wilson Roberts was born and raised in the small farming community of Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A musician and storyteller, he spent ten years collecting ballads and folktales in the North Carolina mountains, taught school in the far northern reaches of New York's Adirondacks, lived on Long Beach Island on the southern New Jersey shore, and later made his home on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He now lives in the hills of Western Massachusetts.The settings of Roberts's novels reflect the breadth of those experiences and the people he has known: North Country trappers and hunters; Appalachian banjo players and fiddlers; serpent-handling, strychnine-drinking Tennessee preachers; Caribbean sailors, restaurant workers, musicians, police officers, and criminals; an itinerant nineteenth-century actor who ended up in John Ford's first full-length film; two brothers from Lubbock, Texas, who establish an intentional community in a Western Massachusetts hill town; and a small-town police chief haunted decades later by the possibility that an innocent man was convicted and executed.Roberts writes about winners and losers, small-time sinners, wanderers, working people, outsiders, and ordinary men and women made extraordinary by their struggle to endure in a chaotic world. His fiction is rooted in place, memory, music, folklore, and the hard, comic, often dangerous lives of people trying to prevail against the odds.