You’ve probably never heard Joe Bryan’s name.

But his story is the stuff of the Bible, the fodder of Shakespeare, the unending theme of all those Horatio Alger books that fascinated young readers early in the last century, the same themes that have grabbed attention through the generations — and made headlines.

From rags to riches.

Poor boy makes good.

Man born to poverty snags heiress.

Enough?

Not nearly.

Greensboro’s Joe Bryan lived 99 years, made and gave away millions of dollars and could have prompted plots aplenty.

Abandoned child without education becomes wealthy philanthropist who builds universities and medical schools.

Man’s denial of mother in insane asylum for half a century and grief for wife’s long loss of memory become impetus for Duke Medical School’s Alzheimer’s research center.

Father of commercial and public television in North Carolina fails as father to his own children.

But no matter what kind of headlines could be written, the last thing former Salisbury Post reporter Ned Cline dreamed was that his biography — “Adding Value: The Joseph M. Bryan Story from Poverty to Philanthropy” — would ever be the hottest book on Barnes and Noble shelves at Christmastime.

“It’s just been unbelievable,” he says.

The book came out on Dec. 3. It was placed in Greensboro stores only. And 900 to 1,000 of the 3,000 copies printed were gone within two weeks.

“I was going to make sure we put copies in all the state’s public libraries,” Ned says, “but now I’m not sure we’re going to have enough for that. The Barnes and Noble manager told me it’s the hottest thing in his store.”

But Bookmasters at Ketner Center — Salisbury is the only place except Greensboro where the books have been placed so far — will have enough copies when Ned signs books there Saturday afternoon from 1 to 3.

Not that local folks will cluck as loudly as Greensboro neighbors who murmur “Oh, dear!” when they read about their city’s most generous benefactor, says News and Record writer Jim Schlosser, because Ned doesn’t spare him.

“I include the warts,” he says, “and talk about a dysfunctional family.”

The Bryan book, as well as his first — a still unpublished biography of Marshall Rauch — and a third he’s doing on Stanley Frank, are all books about poor boys who became wealthy men and major philanthropists.

So warts are essential.

“They’re not vanity books,” he says. “They’re accurate portrayals of these people’s lives.”

And a newspaper man must be accurate.

Not that Ned Cline expected to be a newspaperman any more than a biographer.

Whenhe graduated from Mount Pleasant High School, he says, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I didn’t have any money to go to college.

“But I had always been better with language than math, and I got a chance to get a rookie reporter’s job with the Concord Tribune as a farm reporter. I think that was because I knew the difference between a bull and a steer, and most reporters don’t. I had grown up on a farm.”

That farm reporter’s job put him in the right place to meet Terry Sanford when he was running for governor in 1960.

That’s all it took.

Immediately, he knew he wanted to be a political reporter — and he headed to Catawba College to major in political science.

He laughs about those days. His favorite professors were the late Peter Cooper and Greg Singer, who agreed on nothing.

“But they both wanted you to express your opinion,” Ned remembers.

At Catawba, he was co-editor of the newspaper, vice president of the student body — and a typist (and more)at Summersett Funeral Home.

“I didn’t have enough money to continue living in the dorm after my sophomore year,” he says, “so I moved to Summersett’s and lived rent free in exchange for typing their obits.”

And picking up bodies.

“If we had a death call at night, I’d go to the hospital and pick up the body. I absolutely hated it, but it was an economic necessity. The day I graduated, I moved out. I had an eerie feeling the whole time I was there, but it got me through school.”

After Catawba, he married Linda Kelly of Salisbury and thought about law school.

“But I decided I wanted to write about politicians and lawyers rather than be one,” so he took a job at the Post in 1964 for an unexpected $100 a week.

In the spring, Jim Hurley, former owner of the Post, offered him a job for $90 a week.

“When I started,” Ned says, “he asked me, ‘Did we agree on $100 a week?’ and I said, ‘Yes!’ ”

He got a raise before he wrote a word — and the ’60s offered extremes everywhere.

“I covered the Klan on one extreme,” he remembers, “and the Great Society on the other.”

While he was at the Post, he won a Washington Journalism Scholarship to spend four months in the nation’s capital learning about government. Later, after he’d gone to the Greensboro Daily News, he won a year’s Nieman Fellowship to study southern politics at Harvard.

“I had a wonderful career in newspapers,” he says, with more than 30 years as reporter, editor, manager, editorial writer and editorial page columnist at the Post, Greensboro’s News and Record and the Charlotte Observer.

“And I had reached the point that I could keep doing the same thing for 10 or 15 years more or do something different, so I decided I wanted to do something different” — and surprised himself in 1997 by retiring at 58 to write a book about Marshall Rauch, a former state senator.

Rauch, a Jewish businessman in Gastonia, was born into poverty but made money making Christmas tree ornaments — and sold his company and set up a foundation to give money away.

And he wanted Ned to tell his story.

A year and a half later, Cline had finished the book, but lawyers checking a chapter on Rauch’s business dealings with Jim Gardner, North Carolina’s former Republican lieutenant governor, put it temporarily on hold — and Ned turned to Bryan.

He’d become fascinated by Bryan during his years at the News and Record.

“He was very, very careful to protect his public image. He wanted nothing but positive, upbeat stories about him and his activities. And the reporter in me said there’s more to this man than this.

“I’d also become aware of his problems with his family — from general conversation in Greensboro andwhen two grandchildren filed a lawsuit against trustees of his foundation., saying they were due more details of how he set it up.

“I had written editorial columns about this, and that’s what intrigued me. So once I left newspapers to write books, I went to the foundation and suggested a book on Joe Bryan. They agreed with the understanding that I would control content.”

The amazing thing was that Bryan had saved his family’s voluminous records and letters, dating back to the Civil War, and before his death had turned it all over to the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

“He had two spinster aunts who saved all these things,” Ned says, “and they finally came to Joe, probably in the ’80s.”

Ned spent a year in the library, reading everything.

“It was a surprise that he was so careful about his public image but was aware of all these things and aware that after his death they would come out but not during his lifetime. He went to a lot of trouble and expense to make sure these things were all there. He hired a person to go through them and run down loose ends.

“I think he realized this was a story that needed to be told and maybe help others do things differently, but I don’t know because he never said anything.

“And I think he was embarrassed and ashamed.” He had become so prosperous and was so determined to protect himself about family things — about a father who had run away, a brother who was given away, a mother with mental illness when mental illness wasn’t talked about.

“No doubt,” he says, “Joe Bryan was helped along the way because he married the right woman, a heiress,” whose father headed Jefferson Standard Life and gave him a job there.

But before he met her, before he was beginning to have phenomenal success on his own as a member of the Cotton Exchange in New York at the age of 23, Ned says, he “was a man who had every reason to fail, to say, ‘I can’t do it.’ ” No parents. No formal education. No money.

“Once he had to borrow 50 cents to pay a hospital bill — it’s incredible. But he made no excuses. A friend in Greensboro said maybe he never mentioned any of this because he didn’t want anybody to say, ‘Poor Joe ... ’ ”

Nobody ever said, “Poor Joe.”

Ned interviewed about 150 people, but not everyone he wanted to interview.

None of his three children had a good relationship with him. One, Nancy Faircloth, former wife of Sen. Lauch Faircloth, and two granddaughters refused to talk to him.

“But I’m doing these things because I think people with interesting, productive lives need to have full and accurate stories of their efforts written for future generations to read,” he says, and all three men he’s written about are good role models.

“I never did envision this,” he says. “I never had a long range game plan. I figured things would take care of themselves, and they always have. This just sort of happened, and it was a great career change for me. I never thought I’d write books, but I think of myself as a biographer now, writing about good people doing good things.

“And it couldn’t have happened if not for Rauch.”

And Bryan?

Would he have liked the book Ned will sign here Saturday?

Ned thinks he would, even if it does tell his secrets — that he and Kathleen lied in their 1927 wedding announcement and said Joe’s parents were dead, that he and Kathleen were nearly divorced early in their marriage but patched things up and stayed together 57 years, that he was poor and virtually abandoned — and he covered a lot of that up for a long time.

But it’s in the archives now, so his life is an open book.

And if the interesting tidbits pull you in, you’ll understand why his old political friend Kerr Scott said Joe Bryan plowed to the end of the row, even into his 99th year — and whether you ever before heard his name or not, you are a beneficiary — and can’t miss his message.

Making money is great.

Giving it away is better.