num_pages: 307
description: Based on the true story of Matt Bondurant's grandfather and two granduncles The Wettest County in the World is a gripping tale of brotherhood greed and murder. The Bondurant Boys were a notorious gang of roughnecks and moonshiners who ran liquor through Franklin County Virginia during Prohibition and in the years after. Forrest the eldest brother is fierce mythically indestructible and the consummate businessman; Howard the middle brother is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; and Jack the youngest has a taste for luxury and a dream to get out of Franklin. Driven and haunted these men forge a business fall in love and struggle to stay afloat as they watch their family die their father's business fail and the world they know crumble beneath the Depression and drought. White mule white lightning firewater popskull wild cat stump whiskey or rotgut -- whatever you called it Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s. When Sherwood Anderson the journalist and author of Winesburg Ohio was covering a story there he christened it the wettest county in the world. In the twilight of his career Anderson finds himself driving along dusty red roads trying to find the Bondurant brothers piece together the clues linking them to The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy and break open the silence that shrouds Franklin County.In vivid muscular prose Matt Bondurant brings these men -- their dark deeds their long silences their deep desires -- to life. His understanding of the passion violence and desperation at the center of this world is both heartbreaking and magnificent.
language: English
title: The Wettest County in the World
publisher: Scribner