Robert Hicks
Robert Hicks, the author of The NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH, was born and raised in South Florida. In 1974 he moved to Williamson County, Tennessee; moving to 'Labor in Vain,' a late-eighteenth-century log cabin, near Leiper's Fork, Tennessee in 1979.
Working both as a music publisher and in artist management in both country and rock music, Hicks's interests remain broad and varied. A partner in the B. B. King's Blues Clubs in Nashville, Memphis and Los Angeles, Hicks serves as 'Curator of Vibe' of the corporation.
A lifelong collector, he was the first Tennessean to be listed among Arts & Antiques' Top 100 Collectors in America - his collection focuses on Outsider Art, Tennesseana, and Southern Material Culture. He served as co-curator (with Ben Caldwell and Mark Scala) on the exhibition, Art of Tennessee, at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. The exhibition was a seven-year endeavor from conception at his kitchen table to it's opening, September 2003. He was co-editor of the exhibition's award winning and critically acclaimed catalog, Art of Tennessee (University of Tennessee Press, September 2003).
In the field of historic preservation, he has served on the Boards of Historic Carnton Plantation, the Tennessee State Museum, The Williamson County Historical Society, and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. In December 1997, after a third term as President of the Carnton board, and in light of his years of service to the site, Hicks was named by board resolution: "the driving force in the restoration and preservation of Historic Carnton Plantation."
He founded and serves as president of Franklin's Charge: A Vision and Campaign for the Preservation of Historic Open Space in the fight to secure and preserve both battlefield and other historic open space in Williamson County. Franklin's Charge took on the massive mission of saving what remains of the eastern flank of the battlefield at Franklin - the largest remaining undeveloped fragment of the battlefield - and turning it into a public battlefield park. The American Battlefield Protection Program has called this endeavor "the largest battlefield reclamation in North American history." By the end of 2005, Franklin's Charge had already raised over 5 million dollars toward this goal, surpassing anything ever done by any other community in America to preserve battlefield open space. As Jim Lighthizer, President of the Civil War Preservation Trust has said, "There is no 'close second' anywhere in the nation, to what Robert Hicks and Franklin's Charge has done in Franklin."
His first novel, THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH (Warner Books, NY, 2005) was born out of his many years of work at Carnton and his passion for the preservation of the remaining fragments of the battlefield. In writing the novel, his hope was to bring national attention back to this moment in our nation's history, the impact those five bloody hours played in making us a nation, and in the preservation of the sites tied to the story. THE WIDOW OF THE SOUTH was launched September 1, 2005 to overwhelming critical success, entering the NY TIMES BESTSELLER LIST after only one week out.
As a writer, his essays on regional history, southern material culture, furniture and music have appeared in numerous publications over the years. His first book, a collaboration with French-American photographer Michel Arnaud, came out in 2000: Nashville: the Pilgrims of Guitar Town (Stewart, Tabori & Chang). He is now co-editing (with Justin Stelter and John Bohlinger) a collection of short stories, A Guitar & A Pen: Short Stories and Story-Songs By Nashville Songwriters, and is hard at work on his next novel.