W. E. Blackhurst

Riders on the Flood is performed solely in the Island Park Amphitheatre of Ronceverte, West Virginia—the same town and locale that saw the true lumbering industry during the latter half of the 19th century.

Blackhurst was a graduate of Green Bank High School and Glenville State College, attended West Virginia University and the Davis and Elkins College. He returned to his alma mater (Green Bank) and taught English and Latin for thirty-two years. He married Stella Mae Yates (1917-2000) on June 25, 1934, and they moved into a house his elder brother Henry O'Dell Blackhurst (1895-1989) and father had built together a few years prior. On July 25, 1940, their only child, an unnamed boy, was born in Cass, and only lived a few minutes before being asphyxiated by the afterbirth. He and his wife operated the Wildlife Museum in Cass.

Warren Elmer "Tweard" Blackhurst (1904–1970) was an author and a lifelong resident of the Cass community who centered on the culture of eastern West Virginia where the higher elevations supported northern pine forests. "Riders of the Flood" which is arguably the most well-known of Blackhurst's books, for it centers on the world of the late 19th to early 20th-century logging industry in eastern West Virginia through the Greenbrier River and its tributaries.

Warren Elmer Blackhurst was born on October 10, 1904 in Arbovale, West Virginia to Rev. Harry Blackhurst (1870–1956) and his wife Lula May née Burner (1870–1960). His father, an immigrant from Tunstall, England, came to America in 1886 with his parents Jabez (1843–1914) and Sarah (1842–1924), and Warren's mother was an American-born native of Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Warren was the seventh of eleven children. While a student at Green Bank High School, he fell in love with a fellow student Annie Moates, and some of his schoolmates called him "Moates" to tease him about his unrequited love for Annie. The name stuck, and for the rest of his life, he never went by Warren, but by either Moates or "Tweard." Warren spent nearly his entire life close to the lumber industry, and knew the intricacies of this industry like few other people. Even more remarkably, he was able to portray the logging workers in a realistic light. Whether they are the blustering bully about to get drunk and rip a town apart just because it is payday, or a young man trying to make something of himself, the characters sounded like actual people who one might already know. As a native of West Virginia, Blackhurst knew when was self-parody and when it would ring false.

Blackhurst devoted much of his life to collecting and writing the history of the early logging days. At the time of his birth in 1904, the lumber business was just seriously getting underway in the Greenbrier Valley following the completion of the C&O Railway's Greenbrier Branch. One location in his books, the town of Cass, was created by the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company, and Blackhurst grew up during the most active years of that company in the valley.