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. Through her husband, screenwriter Bruce Manning, she developed an interest in longer forms of writing-novels and screenplays.

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.

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. This is the third novel in Gwen Bristow's Plantation Trilogy, which also includes Deep Summer and The Handsome Road. Only after they marry does she learn that Ardeith is mortgaged to the hilt and she will need every ounce of her modern ingenuity to save it. Kester Larne is the heir to Ardeith, a sprawling Louisiana plantation whose glory days are long behind it, and his antebellum charm sweeps Eleanor off her feet. While Eleanor is a member of a modern clan-practical, impatient, and ready for the future-she cannot help but fall for a man steeped in the ways of the Old South. In a region shattered by war, levees mean stability, prosperity, and modernity. In 1912, Eleanor Upjohn sits with her father near the work camp, overseeing the construction of a levee on the Mississippi. New York Times -bestselling author Gwen Bristow presents a captivating love story that dramatizes the struggle between the ways of the old Louisiana plantation families and those of the new twentieth-century South

Gwen bristow plantation trilogy