New York Times-bestselling author Gwen Bristow brings to life Civil War-era Louisiana in the impassioned, poignant story of a plantation mistress and a poor seamstress-and the men they love-whose lives are irrevocably changed as the Old South falls Corrie May Upjohn stands on the levee, watching men unload the riverboats and wishing she could travel far away. A poor preacher's daughter, she is only fourteen, and her life is already laid out for her: marriage in a year or two, and then decades of drudgery. At nearby Ardeith Plantation, Ann Sheramy Larne lives in luxury, but feels just as imprisoned as Corrie May. Their lives could not be more different, but when the horrors of war and Reconstruction come to Louisiana, these two women will band together to survive. This is the second novel in Gwen Bristow's Plantation Trilogy, which also includes Deep Summer and This Side of Glory. "Very rich, very fully and carefully detailed . . . Miss Bristow belongs among those Southern novelists who are trying to interpret the South and its past in critical terms. It may be that historians will alter some of the details of her picture. But no doubt life in a small river town in Louisiana during the years 1859-1885 was like the life revealed in The Handsome Road." -TheNew York Times "Bristow has the true gift of storytelling." -Chicago Tribune Gwen Bristow (1903-1980), the author of seven bestselling historical novels that bring to life momentous events in American history, such as the siege of Charleston during the American Revolution (Celia Garth) and the great California gold rush (Calico Palace), was born in South Carolina, where the Bristow family had settled in the seventeenth century. After graduating from Judson College in Alabama and attending the Columbia School of Journalism, Bristow worked as a reporter for New Orleans' Times-Picayune from 1925 to 1934. Through her husband, screenwriter Bruce Manning, she developed an interest in longer forms of writing-novels and screenplays. After Bristow moved to Hollywood, her literary career took off with the publication of Deep Summer, the first novel in a trilogy of Louisiana-set historical novels, which also includes The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. Bristow continued to write about the American South and explored the settling of the American West in her bestselling novels Jubilee Trail, which was made into a film in 1954, and in her only work of nonfiction, Golden Dreams. Her novel Tomorrow Is Forever also became a film, starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles, and Natalie Wood, in 1946.