Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time by John E. Ross

One of the greatest achievements in the history of American publishing was the Rivers of America series which was inaugurated in 1937 and completed in 1974 by three different prominent New York publishers. The books were mostly authored by literary figures, not historians or geographers, thus recognizing the importance of river watersheds to all aspects of the lives of people. The sixty-five books in the series pretty much covered the watersheds where all Americans lived and were often highly anticipated as literary events. Their authors are a who’s who of American literature from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas to Edgar Lee Masters and included the first book illustrated by Andrew Wyeth. Wilma Dykeman (1920-2006) had lived her whole life near the waters of the French Broad River in both North Carolina and Tennessee, and was an ideal person to write the book on that river for that series. At the time, however, she had not published a single book, and her publisher objected to her chapter on