A bookmobile in Blount County, Tennessee, in 1943. Photo by the Tennessee Valley Authority
By Jim Stokely
A current resident of the Givens Highland Farms community in Black Mountain, George Brosi has lived and traveled all over Southern Appalachia during his full and impactful life.
Is he a transplant or a native? He was born during WWII in Providence, Rhode Island, but his family moved to the new atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1944. His father, Dr. Albert Brosi, had been recruited from the United States’ massive synthetic rubber initiative to the Manhattan Project in order to refine nuclear materials.
George Brosi
George graduated from Oak Ridge High School, then from Carleton College in Minnesota. “At Carleton,” George told an interviewer in 2024, “I got involved in civil rights, and women’s issues, and the Vietnam War, and the New Left and all of that. When I left, I realized that I could be an agent of social change. I skipped my graduation and went to work for Students for a Democratic Society.”
A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, George came to eastern Kentucky to work with regional youth for the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM). Following marriage in 1971 to Connie Fearington, and a series of jobs that included organizing for Save Our Cumberland Mountains and managing CSM’s bookstore, George and Connie began what became a 40-year Southern mountain institution: Appalachian Mountain Books.
Although Appalachian Mountain Books included a bookstore in Berea, KY, a large part of the business involved George taking his traveling bookshop to regional conferences, festivals and other events.
“I’m glad I did it,” George says. “We brought books to people who might not have discovered them otherwise. I remember Western North Carolina writer Robert Morgan saying that, when he was growing up in Zirconia near the Green River, his parents did not own a vehicle. The highlight of Robert’s day as a child was when the bookmobile came by.”
These days, George is taking it relatively easy. He enjoys the North Carolina mountains and his retirement home community, and stays in contact with his seven children. Even so, he serves on the coordinating committee of the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign. His memoir, My Quest for a Beloved Community, will be published by the University of Tennessee Press in January 2027.
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