Gerard Helferich

Biography

Gerard Helferich is the author of High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta (Counterpoint, 2008), which received the 2008 Author’s Award for nonfiction from the Mississippi Library Association. His other books include Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin: Madness, Vengeance, and the Campaign of 1912 (Lyons, 2013), Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya (Lyons, 2012), and Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World (Gotham, 2004). A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he publishes book reviews in the Wall Street Journal.

See Work

REPORTING / Spring 2014

White Gold

By Gerard Helferich ,  Photography by John Montfort Jones

The all-​time peak for cotton farming in Mississippi was 1930, when more than 4 million acres were grown. In 2009, barely 300,000 acres were planted statewide. Mississippi has transformed from the Land of Cotton to the Land of Soybeans and...

A giant cotton picker in one of the fields of farmers Heath and Keath Killebrew, west of Yazoo City, MS, early October 2013.