A record of the rise and fall of the BMC farm that foregrounds the voices of a new cast of characters Black Mountain College BMC was a wellspring of 20thcentury creative unorthodoxy. From its founding in 1933 and over its celebrated 23year history the small liberal arts school in rural North Carolina attracted a remarkable number of famous and soontobe famous artists writers and visionaries including Anni and Josef Albers Ruth Asawa John Cage Merce Cunningham Willem de Kooning Buckminster Fuller Ray Johnson Charles Olson and M.C. Richards. The exploits of these BMC cultural luminaries have been recounted time and time again.David Silvers fascinating new book offers a very different perspective. The farm was vital to BMC. Throughout the Depression and World War II it provided vital sustenance while serving as a testing ground for selfsufficiency communal living and collaborationthe most precious and precarious ingredient at the college.Through deep original research The Farm at Black Mountain College follows renegade students faculty and farmers as they establish a campus farm in the 1930s build a better farm in the 1940s and watch it all collapse in the 1950s. We meet a new cast of BMC characters whose stories have seldom if ever been explored and whose adventures in agriculture illuminate what exactly happened at BMC across the decades from optimistic community building to its plunge into substanceaddled scarcity. In these engrossing pages we encounter the extraordinary folk whose endeavors on the land helped shape the Black Mountain College of myth and extraordinary reality.David Silver born 1968 is professor and chair of environmental studies at the University of San Francisco. He teaches classes on urban agriculture hyperlocal food systems and food culture and storytelling.