Whatever happened to “chestnuts roasting on an open fire”? I found the answer but in an unexpected place: Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Overstory,” which features a chapter that elucidates the tragic demise of the American chestnut tree.
Nicknamed the “redwood of the East,” the 100-foot “king of the forest” once dominated the tree cover across more than 200 million acres in its natural range, from Maine to Georgia, from the East Coast to the Ohio River Valley.
