ABSTRACT
The book has two parallel stories. The one depicted in the fi lm is that of the Bondurant brothers – grandfather and great uncles of the author – and the culture in which Franklin County, Virginia, became the largest producer of illegal whiskey in the US, and thus ‘the wettest county in the world’. Hillcoat (2012), as he notes in his foreword to the renamed novel, locates this story in those of :
the Western legends such as the Daltons and the Jameses . . . [it] portrays the next generation of country outlaws – the men and women who gave birth to the big-time urban mobsters like Capone by supplying the Prohibition cities with their illegal liquor . . . [It is] the story of the little guys out back, the foot soldiers and the worker bees who propped up the urban criminal empire, like a behind the scenes view of the lower ranks that supported a ruthless machine relentlessly pursuing the American dream in what became crime’s fi rst major gold rush.
