Chappell earned his B.A. in 1961 at Duke University, where he studied fiction writing under William Blackburn, who also taught such authors as William Styron, Reynolds Price, and Anne Tyler. There Chappell formed lasting friendships with Price and with the poet James Applewhite. On 2 August 1959 Chappell married Susan Nicholls, who had attended Canton High School with him. Their only child, a son named Heath, was born the following year.
Chappell's public life has been relatively uneventful. After completing an M.A. at Duke in 1964, he accepted a position in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There he has remained--with the exception of a year spent in Italy on a Rockefeller Foundation grant--for more than twenty-five years.
Although Chappell has described poetry as "my first allegiance," his early reputation as a writer was based on the four novels he published between 1963 and 1973. The first of those books, It Is Time, Lord, was written at the invitation of Hiram Haydn, then an editor at Atheneum, who had visited Duke and been impressed by one of Chappell's short stories. Both that novel and Chappell's second, The Inkling (1965), were written in five-week periods, and both were translated into French, the first one by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the translator of works by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and William Styron.
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