Gurney Norman is a novelist and short-story writer whose works include the books Divine Right's Trip, Kinfolks, Ancient Creek, and Allegiance. He is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Kentucky and a former Kentucky poet laureate. A native of eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, he was the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Norman has received many honors for his work, including induction into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, and is a widely known Appalachian literary and cultural advocate. He is a coeditor of Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes and An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature.

Praise for the first edition:

"Divine Right's Trip shows itself to be a subtly written and morally passionate epic of the counterculture, a fictional explication of the hopeful new consciousness come to birth." --John Updike, New Yorker

Praise for the first edition:

"A folk tale; our folk tale. Us land-grabbing long-haired broken-chromosomed aquarian communard anarcho-syndicalist Whole Earth Catalog readers, this is our epic. . . . Divine Right Davenport is our hero, our Odysseus, our Jason, our Beowulf, our Boone; and his quest for his identity, his wholeness, is our quest, his struggle our struggle, his triumph ours, too." --Ed McClanahan, Rolling Stone