John Ehle, from Asheville, lives in W-S (Married to spiderman's Aunt May, for realz)
Wikipedia:
Ehle's first novel, Move Over Mountain, was published by Hodder & Stoughton of London in 1957. The following year, Ehle returned with a biography The Survivor: The Story of Eddy Hukov. In 1964, Harper & Row published perhaps his most well known book, The Land Breakers.[3] The book is a fictional account set in the late 18th century that traces the story of the first white pioneers to settle in the Appalachian wilderness of the mountains of Western North Carolina. The Land Breakers, out of print for several decades, was republished in 2006 by Press 53, a small imprint in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Land Breakers also marked the beginning of a seven part series of historical fiction about the Appalachian region.[4]