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Fiction. Literature. Suspense. Historical Fiction. HTML:*The inspiration for the major motion picture Lawless* Based on the true story of Matt Bondurant's grandfather and two granduncles, The Wettest County in the World is a gripping and gritty tale of bootlegging, brotherhood, 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. Howard, the eldest brother, is an ox of a man besieged by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; Forrest, the middle brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; 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.… (more)
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Matt Bondurant's "The Wettest County in the World" (aka "Lawless" in the July 2012 movie tie-in reprint edition) is a history-based fictional novel about the lives of the author's own grandfather Jack and his great-uncles Howard and Forrest Bondurant. It relates how the Bondurant brothers ran a bootleg liquor operation (which is called 'blockading' in the local vernacular of the book) in Jackson County, Virginia in the late 1920's/early 1930's. The book's title is based on a quote from writer Sherwood Anderson which is one of the novel's epigraphs: "... the wettest section in the U.S.A. …the spot that fairly dripped illicit liquor, and kept right on dripping it after prohibition ended…is Franklin County, Virginia."
This huge amount of illegal liquor production required a network of corrupt law officials and officers to keep it protected and some of that came to light in an eventual trial which was documented by T. Keister Greer in "The Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935". Greer's book became a major source for author Bondurant's fictional tale along with his family's personal stories. Bondurant's book in turn became the source for Nick Cave's screenplay for the film "Lawless" directed by John Hillcoat which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012 and is scheduled for a general theatrical release in late August 2012.
The story is told in flashbacks from the time of the 1935 trial with writer Sherwood Anderson reporting on the scene on behalf of his own newspapers and also doing research for his later novel "Kit Brandon" which was built around the local myths of female blockader Willie Carter Sharpe (who was also perhaps the inventor of the American muscle car, due to her souped-up Fords used to outrun law officers). Anderson's history is portrayed reasonably accurately except for an error in his publisher's name (Liverright used instead Boni & Liveright) and Ernest Hemingway's 1926 "The Torrents of Spring" parody of Anderson's 1925 "Dark Laughter" mis-dated as if it was from 1934. The constant jumps back and forth between 1929-30 and 1935 took a lot of suspense and momentum out of the book though and made for difficult reading although each of the chapters by themselves were quite evocative in portraying the atmosphere of the Virginia Appalachian settings.
That said, Rick Bragg told a similar tale when he wrote about his bootlegging grandfather in "Ava's Man", a more gripping tale, told by a far better writer about a much more intriguing man.
N.B. - 2015 - Just watched the movie on netflicks, starring Tom Hardy and Shia Leboeuf. It was done in a linear fashion, and although crazy violent, it was so much better! I know it didn't do well in theaters, but I did like it a lot as a movie!