Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel, Authors
A collaborative biography by Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel tells the story of photographer and conservationist George Masa, whose life has, until now, offered more questions than answers. Bonesteel, a documentary filmmaker who wrote and directed The Mystery of George Masa (2002), discovered while making the film a bundle of letters Masa left behind with the family with whom he boarded. These letters helped unlock some of Masa’s previously unknown past.
The book’s title references how Masa often reshaped his own life. “As a young man in Japan, he reimagined his life in coming to the US in 1906,” McCue says. “He reimagined his life again nearly a decade later when he ‘launched out on an adventure,’ leaving the more familiar west coast communities where he’d lived and worked, and moving to Asheville. Hired as an ‘ironing man’ at the Grove Park Inn, he reimagined his life once again and ‘worked like hell, studied like hell and got good reputation’ to become an accomplished photographer, hired by the Vanderbilts, praised by his contemporaries.”
Although he lived only to the age of 48, Masa experienced WWI, the flu epidemic, a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the Great Depression, among other hurdles. “Perseverance is such an important characteristic needed to create art, conservation, social change or, visually, any goal or objective,” says Bonesteel. “I think Masa’s story—and I hope the book—speaks to it clearly, illustrates and maybe inspires folks to that end: ‘Never surrender.’”
George Masa: A Life Reimagined, September, 2024, biography, paperback, $28.95, by Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel, and published by Smokies Life, Gatlinburg, TN.
