He was found in his office, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart playing on the record player and his final set of student papers graded and neatly stacked in the desk drawer.
[2] In a career cut short by illness and suicide, Byron Herbert Reece produced an enduring body of poetry and fiction from the sounds and spirits of his North Georgia homeland.
His two novels, in turn, are remarkable regional portraits - one a mountain family drama of overland journey to Old Testament rhythms, the other a morality play of a small-town lynching.
During these years, Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill and Kentucky writer Jesse Stuart - themselves offspring of the rural Appalachians - early recognized Reece’s talent.
His books and honors never yielded much in money, however, and Reece’s labors never long allayed the financial worries that attended the harsh circumstances of the farm and family illness.
He was teaching part-time at Young Harris to make ends meet, in fact, when depression and illness wore him down and Reece took his own life on June 3, 1958, three months shy of his forty-first birthday.