The 8 Million Dollar Man

Image credit: Cold Mountain: Phil Bray/Miramax Films

The story behind Cold Mountain is one of the great publishing yarns of the last 10 years. Around 1994, with his wife Katherine's blessing, Frazier quit his job as a lecturer at North Carolina State (those gigs, he says, are ''the equivalent of [working at] Wal-Mart'') and went to work full-time on a novel, a spin on The Odyssey about a Civil War deserter named Inman who walks across North Carolina at the end of the war, home to Ada, the girl he loves. Eventually he showed what he had to Kaye Gibbons, a fiction writer whom he met because their daughters went to the same school. Gibbons sent it to New York, Atlantic Monthly Press published it, and in 1997 Cold Mountain became a slow-building word-of-mouth sensation that, years before it was transformed into an Oscar-bait epic directed by Anthony Minghella, beat out Don DeLillo's Underworld for the National Book Award.

Thirteen Moons, inspired by a real 19th-century white man adopted by Cherokees, follows protagonist Will Cooper through almost 100 years of tribal history. Frazier admires the Cherokee. ''Where I grew up,'' Frazier says, referring to Andrews, N.C., ''the Snowbird branch of the Cherokee land was just, I don't know what, 15 miles away as the crow flies. When I was a kid, there were people living over there that didn't speak English.'' (Currently he's overseeing a project to translate part of Thirteen Moons into Cherokee as a teaching tool, because ''at the rate it's going, in 20 years Cherokee will be a dead language.'')

In both his novels, Frazier is interested in resurrecting lost, exotic worlds — he does a ton of research to get the details right, down to the smallest honey-locust pod or stile over a fence. ''What I try to get into the books,'' he explains, ''is the level of knowledge that my grandparents and old people had when I was young, like how you would go out for a walk in the fields with them and they knew the names of everything.''

So far the critical reception to Thirteen Moons has been mixed. Aside from a few advance raves, the notices have been softer than they were for Cold Mountain. Again, Frazier can't worry about that. ''It's not like I don't have respect for reviews,'' he says, ''but it's not like I could've written this book 15 other ways, either. I don't read a lot of reviews of my books. It's been at least five years since I read The New York Times Book Review.''

He prefers the indie-music magazine Paste. Frazier's novels and author photos make him look like more of a rugged mountain man than he really is. He likes hanging out in ratty coffee shops, buying a convertible every 10 years or so, and going down to the record store on certain Tuesdays to pick up new indie albums — lately, M. Ward's Post-War and Thom Yorke's The Eraser — on the day of release. He's also planning his next book — another North Carolina story — but ''if I work on this idea, I'll make the leap into the 20th century,'' he says. ''I feel like I'm pretty well done with the 19th.''

First, now that the four-year sprint to write Thirteen Moons is done, Frazier's looking forward to some leisure time. After this interview, the avid mountain biker is going for a ride in the trails near his home. ''It's not like I'm not happy if I don't write, and it's not like I have some sense that I should publish a book every two or three years,'' he says. The author of the fall's biggest publishing gamble is an exceptionally modest man. ''I mean, I still have a hard time thinking of myself as a writer,'' he says. ''Those people I studied in school, they're writers.'' And with that, he goes quiet for a moment again.