The extraordinary, surprising history of the Catskills--America's original frontier; its first great vacation land, home of the Borscht Belt, and the Woodstock festival (the music festival to end all music festivals); the subject for the 19th-century Hudson River School paintings that gave texture, form, and color to the imaginings of Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederic Church; the setting for the tales of Washington Irving, which created American prototypes, and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, which reinvented America's past and introduced it to its own myths and traditions, stories that were inspired by the mountains Irving and Cooper roamed in their youth.The Catskills are legendary, home to poets, artists, hucksters and gangsters, idealists and tycoons, prizefighters, politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians, spiritualists, outcasts and rebels, yet their centrality to the American experience has largely gone undiscovered--until now, with Stephen...