As schoolchildren we learned that once upon a time, Lowell was a powerful center of Yankee ingenuity and industry. In these lumbering fatigued buildings American textile manufacturing was born, freeing us for the first time from our dependence on British production facilities. In the way that money in the pocket defines self-reliance more meaningfully than rhetoric alone, our young nation was finally striking out on its own. Raw cotton from the South, spun and woven into fabric in our city, clothed the entire country including its slaves in the form of coarse, cheap cloth called osanburg. We learned, too, that Lowell's factory girls, a group of young women fresh off the farm, distinguished themselves nationally as early mill workers with a bent for poetry, essays and related cultural accomplishments-gathered in a monthly magazine, The Lowell Offering, that won praise from Charles Dickens among many others. Most of us listened and quickly forgot about the city's illustrious heritage. There was a reason. None of it was present in our own lives. Lowell and Lawrence were soiled, depleted cities that were barely hanging on. Our own neighborhoods might be clean and cheerful, but the city itself was our ailing uncle, too old to reinvent himself, hobbled and outmoded, unsophisticated, barely cultured but against all odds, endearing and even lovable. Thirty miles south of us, Boston glistened with the sparkle and sass of a large metropolis. As young teenagers we occasionally ventured forth, stared up at tall buildings, and felt like bumpkins. That was Lowell, an industrial community with no thriving industry, a farming community with no farms, sitting beside a river that was so polluted it smelled like rancid milk and glinted with a toxic greenish-brown sheen. Swollen dead fish traveled past belly-up under its bridges. Its numerous barrooms sported large jars of pickled pigs' knuckles and served corned beef and cabbage to the declining population of mill workers, many of whom wandered in at 6 A.M. after their night shift. There was little hope for employment: The textile mills had long ago relocated to North and South Carolina and other states below the Mason-Dixon line. The Boston Red Sox were more than our baseball team; they were our collective attitude toward the future. It stank. Like Lowell, the BoSox once had it all and lost it so long ago that almost nobody alive could remember exactly when that was. The past was a painful reminder of glory long gone, the present was a struggle not to be pummeled by stronger, more agile competitors-the loathed New York Yankees-and the days and years to come-well, don't hold your breathe for the Sox to win the World Series any time soon. Lowell was the town that prosperity forgot.

Jack Kerouac grew up in Lowell and drank himself to death at an early age. There may not be an exact cause-and-effect relationship between those two events, but consider this passage from his novel, Dr. Sax, which he set in Lowell:

There was something wet and gloomy… something hopeless, gray, dreary, nineteen-thirty-ish, lostish, broken not in the wind a cry but a big dull blurt hanging dumbly in a gray brown mass of semi-late-afternoon cloudy darkness and pebble grit… something that can't possibly come back again in America and history, the gloom of the unaccomplished mud-heap civilization.

Kerouac ran away early-to New York and Columbia University. Few in Lowell paid him much attention for years until finally he got too famous to ignore. In the mid- 1980s, a park and commemorative sculptures were built to honor Jack. By then he had passed into legend; mythology and merchandising had transformed this bitterly unhappy native son into a symbol of spontaneous exuberance, and no doubt Kerouac himself would have been deeply amused to learn that Lowell was honoring his memory, since he savaged the city at every turn.

Coming along a generation after Kerouac in the'50s, I didn't share his antipathy but I, too, picked up on the pebble grit and mud-heap gloom. One summer, at sixteen, I got a job for $1.10 an hour in a converted textile factory located where the Merrimack Canal emptied its fetid contents into the river. In this monolithic brick -faced building, which a century earlier housed whirring looms and jennies, shoe counters were now being manufactured. A shoe counter is the stiff rounded insert that stabilizes the heel of the shoe. Made from cellulose material, the counters were cut and molded into horseshoe shapes on loudly clanking machines, dipped in a hot wax solution, then brought to us in the packing department, where they were dumped on large wire-mesh tables. Our job was to scoop up counters, wedge one inside another back-to-back until we stacked half a dozen in this fashion, and then pack them in boxes. The hot wax coating stung at first; within a week I'd begun to build up calluses. The working conditions were less onerous than those encountered by the mill-women of Lowell a century earlier, but perhaps not as different as might be expected. Naked bulbs barely illuminated the vast interior, casting harsh shadows. You stood in the same spot all day, on wood floors embedded with generations of grime, beside metal posts that seemed to sweat grease, under small windows that opened only a few inches. In fierce summer heat with little ventilation, you were surrounded by the scent of the smoking oil used to lubricate the loud cut-and-dye machines that stamped out the counters. There was a pervasive atmosphere of listless squalor that sapped your energy and dulled your senses as soon as you entered.

I was the lucky one in our crew of teenage packers. I was quitting in six weeks to go back to school. My pallid coworkers, also about sixteen, expected to go nowhere. They were shackled to manual labor possibly for life with no incentive to accomplish more even if they had the ambition. They viewed me, temporarily employed through a family connection to the factory owner, as a hostile alien. I had a future, an opportunity for a college education, and parents who were willing to pay for it. They had Elvis, chopped and channeled deuce coupes with spinner knobs on the steering wheel, Confidential magazine, pink-and-black pegged pants and duck's ass haircuts, long side strands joined to form a vertical tailfin behind the head and held in place by cement-hard Stickum hair pomade. One of my coworkers tattooed the name of his girlfriend on his inner arm with the point of a ballpoint pen. Her name was Mickie, but he misspelled it Mickey, and when he tried to correct his mistake he jabbed the pen over the last two letters during a lunch break and punctured a vein. That was Lowell, sinking into oblivion, circa 1957, barely more than a century after its founding, and at that time a sad testament to the power of cotton to create wealth and happiness at one moment, and despair in the next. I knew next to nothing of Lowell's illustrious past as a teenager growing up with the hulks of those defunct mills staring blankly into the wind all around me like Easter Island totems. Only years later did that the persistent memory of those monolithic relics, so vivid from childhood, encourage me to investigate their origins. I discovered that my hometown came into existence because of an act of enlightened theft. Francis Cabot Lowell, for whom the city was named after his death, stole all the mechanical designs for the complex textile machinery from intractable English mill barons. When the owners would not let Lowell leave Manchester, England with a license to recreate their mills in America, or allow him even to sketch a single drawing, he did the best next thing. Lowell committed the schematics of those intricate spinning machines and power looms to his photographic memory and, with the help of an industrial engineer, built them from scratch back in Massachusetts. If there is anything I admire, it is outrageous, scandalous behavior of that sort. The story of a city that owed its life to larceny quickly became even more interesting when I looked into the details of Lowell's place in the tensions that led to the Civil War and the tight bond between New England's mill magnates-the Lords of the Loom-and their Southern counterparts, the Lords of the Lash, slave-owning wealthy cotton plantation owners. Cotton, I quickly discovered, is simply too valuable a crop to inspire only noble behavior, and too easily grown to invite self-restraint. It lends itself to greed, opportunism, hypocrisy, irrational passion, attempted murder, and episodes of brilliant creativity, all the elements I look for in a gripping tale. This one began in my own backyard and quickly grew into a chronicle of the past and present life of American cotton, a plant that revolutionized the way we live today. Someone had to write it; there were simply too many good stories to tell.