Howard Frank Mosher Books in Order

If you want a strong first novel: A Stranger in the Kingdom → God's Kingdom
If you like family stories and childhood in Vermont: Northern Borders → Waiting for Teddy Williams
If you want adventure and borderland folklore: Disappearances → Where the Rivers Flow North → Walking to Gatlinburg
If you want memoir and place writing: North Country → The Great Northern Express

Howard Frank Mosher was born in Kingston, New York, on June 2, 1942, but the place that defined his writing was the far northeast corner of Vermont. He grew up in central New York, graduated from Cato-Meridian Central School, and carried a lasting love of woods, streams, weather, and local talk into adult life.

He knew early that he wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1964, he and his wife, Phillis, moved to Orleans, Vermont, where both were hired to teach at the local high school. Later he also earned a master's degree from the University of Vermont, and the couple raised two children in Vermont. The Northeast Kingdom gave him the setting, voices, and old stories he had been looking for.

He listened before he wrote.

One local landlady had kept her farm alive during the Depression by making moonshine. Mosher also spent time in the woods with Jake Blodgett, an old horse logger, whiskey runner, and trout fisherman who helped shape several of his books. He taught, worked with teenagers as a social worker, and paid attention. Out of all that came his fictional Kingdom County, a place built from family lore, regional history, and tall tales heard at close range.

In the mid-1970s, he and Phillis sold their farmhouse and used the money to buy him a year to write full time. He finished Disappearances in about ten months. That book, with its Prohibition-era whiskey running and wild father-son energy, set the tone for much of what followed, gritty adventure, rough humor, and people trying to keep a farm, a family, or a piece of dignity alive.

He kept returning to the same country, but never in exactly the same way. Where the Rivers Flow North and On Kingdom Mountain lean into borderland legend and stubborn holdouts. Northern Borders turns toward memory, showing a boy shaped by grandparents, fairs, schoolhouse battles, and farm life. A Stranger in the Kingdom takes on racism and moral panic in a small Vermont town, while Waiting for Teddy Williams folds Red Sox devotion into a tender coming-of-age story. Late in life, God's Kingdom returned to Jim Kinneson and the long shadow of family history.

He could be very funny.

That matters, because Mosher's books are never just solemn hymns to rural life. He wrote about prejudice, secrecy, loss, and the way older ways of living get squeezed by money, roads, development, and modern habits. But he also loved oddballs, pranksters, storytellers, bootleggers, hard cases, and children watching adults with a mix of awe and alarm. Even in dark scenes, there is usually room for mischief.

He was not only a novelist. In North Country, he traveled America's northern border and wrote about the people and landscapes of that huge overlooked band of country. In The Great Northern Express, written after prostate cancer treatment, he turned a long book tour in an aging Chevy into a memoir about roads, readers, fear, gratitude, and the question of what a person loves enough to live for. Those books show the same curiosity and plainspoken warmth as the fiction.

Mosher lived for many years in Irasburg, Vermont, with Phillis, and several of his books were adapted for film, including Disappearances, Where the Rivers Flow North, A Stranger in the Kingdom, and Northern Borders. He received a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a New England Book Award, and Vermont's Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. He died in January 2017, just after finishing Points North, his final return to Kingdom County.