Grand View

About the Book

The picture on the cover of Grand View shows my great uncle, Wayman Redden, with one leg dangling over the precipice of a 2000-foot cliff in the New River Valley of West Virginia. It's no contrived photograph. He designed a homemade timer for the shutter and took it himself in the 1920s. By some accounts, he was insane, and this photo certainly doesn't help his case. However, others swore he was a genius, including the psychiatrists who examined him at a Virginia sanitarium.

Wayman allegedly had a secret: a billion dollar secret. Family legend holds that he discovered an extremely valuable mine on Redden land. Not gold, not silver but something worth a hundred times their value. Unimpressed with the potential fortune, or led by his lunacy or, perhaps, both, he takes his secret and moves to Detroit to work on the assembly line for Henry Ford. There, Wayman is swept up in the tidal wave of the Great Depression and finds himself and a lover caught in the middle of one of the most brutal labor union incidents of the young century, the Ford Hunger March of 1932.

Nine months later, he was dead. Trappers found his frozen body beneath a cliff in the West Virginia woods. Grand View is the story about how he may have died in those woods.

About the Author

John W. Hancock was born in Charlotte, North Carolina sometime in the 1950s. After high school, he spent twelve years in the design engineering industry. In 1979, he moved to Chicago where he met his wife of twenty-three years, Barbara Helen Turico. John and Barb moved back to North Carolina in the mid-1980s where John soon graduated with a B.A. in English and American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. After completing his master's degree and further doctoral studies at the University of South Carolina, John spent fourteen years teaching American and Southern history at his alma mater in Charlotte. John left the university in 2003 to complete Grand View. John and Barb currently live in Cabarrus County, North Carolina where they raise their two children, Stella and Lily.