A! Magazine for the Arts

Local Author Wins Fiction Award

October 9, 2006

Cameron Judd's "Boone: A Novel of an American Legend" has won another honor, the Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award from the North Carolina Society of Historians. The author earlier received the Wilma Dykeman Award for regional fiction and the book was honored at Book Expo America in New York by the Independent Publishers Association.

Judd's expansive recounting of the most pivotal years of the Boone legend follows Daniel from a young man, courting Rebecca who became his wife, to after the founding of Boonesboro in Kentucky. Boone's life was marked by destiny and contradiction. He was Quaker born, peace-loving, yet a celebrated warrior. He was landed, yet frequently impoverished. Devoted to family, he spent long months apart from them, leaving his resilient wife to fend for herself and their children. An intensely private man, he was often called into leadership roles. Sympathetic to the natives of America, and in ways more like them than his own people, he became a trailblazer for the aggressive white civilization. In this imaginative novel, author Cameron Judd interweaves the facts of Daniel Boone's life and destiny with a story crafted from history and shaped by imagination.

Publishers Weekly called Judd "a keen observer of the human heart as well as a fine action writer." Judd is an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor, now working in public relations at Tusculum College. He lives in Chucky, Tennessee and is working on another novel. He is the author of over 40 published books and has appeared as a commentator on the History Channel's "Movies in Time."

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