George Masa: A Life Reimagined

From Cornell University librarian Janet McCue and documentary filmmaker Paul Bonesteel comes the first comprehensively researched biography of the visionary Japanese photographer whose dedication to art and conservation helped spur the national park movement in the Great Smoky Mountains and the creation of the Appalachian Trail.

What moves a person to leave all that they have known for something new, something different, something adventurous?

In this fascinating historical biography, coauthors Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel answer fundamental questions that have swirled around the man known as George Masa ever since the young Japanese immigrant stepped off a train in the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, one summer day in 1915. What Masa’s biographers reveal—through letters, journal entries, train tickets, and public records scattered from Japan to the Great Smoky Mountains—brings into focus for the very first time the personal struggles and triumphs of an emerging environmental hero.

Until now, little has been widely known of Masa beyond the striking images he captured of the Smokies that played a pivotal role in justifying their perpetual protection within the boundary of a national park—a park that is now the most visited in the United States. In his life, Masa shared scant details about his background with his Asheville friends and revealed nothing of the sights and sounds from the native home that shaped his upbringing.

In the years since he died penniless in 1933, many have wondered how this singular figure with a slight frame—friendly and likable yet “quiet and retiring in nature with most people”—managed to make such a dramatic impact on those within his adopted Appalachian community and far beyond.

Although attention to Masa faded for a time, Paul Bonesteel’s 2002 documentary film The Mystery of George Masa kindled renewed interest in the photographer’s life and accomplishments.

In 2009, awareness of Masa as a trailblazing conservationist increased tremendously once again through the six-part Ken Burns documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. The fourth installment of the series, titled “Going Home,” focuses specifically on George Masa and Horace Kephart as charismatic collaborators and conservationists who advocated for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

More recently, in 2019, Janet McCue co-authored the award-winning Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography along with the late George Ellison. In their thorough biography, McCue and Ellison devote a chapter, “Congenial Comrades” to the close and perhaps unlikely friendship of Horace Kephart and George Masa.

Now collaborating to tell Masa’s story in full for the first time with the benefit of years of research conducted in both the United States and Japan, McCue and Bonesteel explore how an immigrant far from home who endured more than his fair share of trials—scrutiny from the Bureau of Investigation in 1918, harassment from the Ku Klux Klan in 1921, then the collapse of the economy, his business, and his health in the early 1930s—ultimately chose to dedicate himself to conservation in Southern Appalachia.

Told with care and attention to detail, this groundbreaking biography sheds light on why Masa might have been drawn to mountainous landscapes and why, soon after his arrival in Asheville, he began a conversation with the ancient peaks of Western North Carolina. At last, we discover an ambitious artist striving for a great future, a "castle of success," but also a role serving a greater cause—a creative and energetic man who reimagined his life time and time again.

Janet McCue is a writer, researcher, avid hiker, and co-author with the late George Ellison Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography, which won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award shortly after its release in 2019. She collaborated with Ellison on several other publications, including the biographical chapter Horace Kephart: Writings (2020). In the 1970s, McCue and her husband began exploring the Great Smoky Mountains on extended backpacking trips; her interest continues today through her work on George Masa, Kephart, and the Smokies Life board of directors. For three decades, McCue was a librarian at Cornell University where she specialized in library administration and digital library development. She lives in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, writing regularly about the beauty and bounty of the area.

Paul Bonesteel is a filmmaker, writer, and passionate lover of the outdoors. Bonesteel's first experience in the Smokies was a 1972 hike up Mount Le Conte when he was seven years old. His filmmaking, research, and writing have informed the conversation and celebration of George Masa since his making The Mystery of George Masa film in 2002. Other award-winning films include The Great American Quilt Revival, The Day Carl Sandburg Died, America's First Forest: Carl Schenck and the Asheville Experiment, Muni, and the four-part Shadow of a Wheel. He grew up hiking, biking, fishing, and exploring the mountains around Hendersonville, North Carolina, and has lived in Asheville for 25 years with his wife, Wyndy, and two sons, Jonah and Luke.