MCKAY JENKINS is the author of The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of America’s First Mountain Soldiers and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe; The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone; and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s and is the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader. He holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. in English. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he is currently Tilghman Professor of English and a member of the Program in Journalism at the University of Delaware. Jenkins lives in Baltimore with his family.