In the 1930s, Franklin County, Virginia, held a dubious
distinction: nearly 100 percent of the population was illegally
trading in liquor. Sherwood Anderson called it "the wettest
section" of the United States, positing that even after
Prohibition had ended, the moonshine continued to flow. These
facts are the starting point for Matt Bondurant's gritty novel
based on the lives of his grandfather and great - uncles, who
were notorious bootleggers in Franklin and who also testified in
the county's most infamous federal trial. For his fictionalized
account, Bondurant listened to family stories and combed through
archives, news clippings and court transcripts to get the
details, but as he points out in the afterword, it was his job
to explore the emotional truths behind the action.  Bondurant
imagines that the devastating loss of their mother and sisters
in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 had great impact on the
Bondurant sons - Howard, Forrest and Jack - who within a decade
had become active in the illicit manu