William Bartram’s Travels and Other Writings (Library of America edition, 1996) contains the book read by Inman during his journey home that chronicled the author’s own travels through the Carolinas. Bartram, one of the earliest American nature writers, carefully gathered details of the landscape that he supplemented with his own drawings.

Stephen Crane’s naturalistic novel, The Red Badge of Courage, originally published in 1894, provides a fictional account of the Civil War and examines the complex ways that the participants responded to it. In his characterization of Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier, Crane explores the disillusionment soldiers feel from military action and questions concerning the nature of honor and courage.

Frazier’s Adventuring in the Andes: The Sierra Club Travel Guide to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, the Amazon Basin, and the Galapagos Islands (1985) is based on his travels to South America.

While doing research for his novel, Frazier consulted Phillip Shaw Paludan’s Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (1981), which focuses on the North Carolina mountaineers who were unsuccessful in their attempts to avoid involvement in the conflict between the North and the South.