Bevis Longstreth (born January 29, 1934) is an American retired lawyer and former Commissioner of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
[2][3] For over two decades, Longstreth was a partner in the New York-based law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, where he spent all of his career as a lawyer, both before and after servicing as SEC commissioner.
The settings span some 3,000 miles (4,800 km), from the ancient city of Sardis, at the western edge of the Persian Empire in Anatolia to the Scythian village of Pazyryk in the Altai Mountains of southwestern Siberia.
The story answers many mysteries surrounding the Pazyryk, a perfectly preserved pile carpet measuring about six feet square discovered in 1949 in a royal Scythian tomb with a man, a woman and nine horses cut down in the prime of life.
It extended from the Indus River to North Africa, from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf, all told one million square miles.
Boats Against the Current charts the struggles of six lives braided together in the Great Depression, with FDR's New Deal and its Works Progress Administration serving as armature for the story.
These fictional characters blend with many historical figures, including Hallie Flanagan, head of the WPA's famous Theatre Project, Huey Long, the tyrant from Louisiana, and William Allen White, the editor and owner of The Emporia Gazette in Kansas.
They had five children:[12] Bevis Longstreth, Sr. was an industrialist, having taken over his mother's family's salt businesses, and upon selling them, starting Thiokol Corporation and leading it until his death in 1944.
[12][13] A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School (1961, JD), Longstreth served as a First Lieutenant in the US Marine Corps from 1956 to 1958.