Robert Frank Jarrett

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, on July 21, 1864, Robert Frank Jarrett spent much of his life connected to the mountain South. A brief biography printed in Occoneechee, the Maid of the Mystic Lake says that although he lived in other places and traveled widely in the South, his principal home remained in North Carolina.

Jarrett was the author of Back Home and Other Poems and, in 1916, published Occoneechee, the Maid of the Mystic Lake. That novel draws on Cherokee themes and the landscape of western North Carolina, showing his interest in the stories, memory, and atmosphere of the region.

Available records place his lifespan from 1864 to 1948. Reliable source material found here gives only limited personal detail, but it consistently presents him as a regional American author whose surviving reputation rests mainly on Occoneechee and his earlier poetry.