Aycock Brown on the Outer Banks - History & Guide by John Railey & Nancy Beach Gray Paperback

Book Synopsis

He Put It on the Map

Long before the Outer Banks became a premier vacation destination lined with rental palaces, boutique hotels and upscale eateries, it was something entirely different--wild, remote, windswept, and largely unknown. Picture miles of open dunes, a few hardy family-run motels, and barely a phone in sight beyond the payphones outside small stores. A few thousand visitors came each year. Most of America had barely heard of the place.

So how did the Banks transform from an isolated stretch of sand into a world-class getaway that now welcomes more than five million visitors annually? The answer begins with one remarkable, nearly forgotten man.

Aycock Brown--slight in build, enormous in heart--was the visionary who almost singlehandedly introduced the Outer Banks to the world. From his wartime work during the World War II U-boat attacks just offshore to the vivid images he captured through the 1980s, Brown shaped the national imagination of what the Banks could be. His photographs didn't just document the region--they sold its magic.

Veteran Outer Banks authors Nancy Beach Gray and John Railey bring Brown's story to life using intimate interviews with those who knew him, his personal papers, and--most importantly--his vast archive of thousands of photographs. Their work offers the first in-depth portrait of the man who turned a remote coastal frontier into an iconic American destination.

About the Author

John Railey has spent much of his life on the Outer Banks. His previous books from The History Press, The Carolian Murder at Nags Head: The Janet Siclari Story (2025), Murder in Manteo: Seeking Justice for Stacey Stanton (2024), Andy Griffith's Manteo: His Real Mayberry (2022) and The Lost Colony Murder on the Outer Banks: Seeking Justice for Brenda Joyce Holland (2021) have been top sellers on the Outer Banks. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he is the former editorial page editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. He is working on a novel about a murder on the Outer Banks in the 1970s.

Nancy Beach Gray and her family owned and operated Queen Anne's Revenge Restaurant in Wanchese for almost three decades. After the restaurant closed, she and her husband R. Wayne Gray sought to capture much of the history of the Outer Banks in their books Legendary Locals of the Northern Outer Banks (2015), Roanoke Island's Boating Heritage (2017), Lost Buffalo City (2018), Commercial Fishing on the Outer Banks (2019), Manteo (2020), Corolla and the Currituck Outer Banks (2021), and Sport Fishing on the Outer Banks (2023). She recently published a collection of her late husband's poetry, A Place of Peace (2025).