In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised in Ohio, she was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and was gaining success as a writer when she departed in 1873 for St. Augustine. During the next six years, she made her way across the South and reported what she saw, first in illustrated travel accounts and then in the poetry, stories...

Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and ...

“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New YorkerIn this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the...

A genteel southern intellectual, saloniste, and wife to a prominent colonel in Jefferson Davis’s inner circle, Mary Chesnut today is remembered best for her penetrating Civil War diary. Composed between 1861 and 1865 and revised thoroughly from the late 1870s until Chesnut’s death in 1886, the diary was published first in 1905, again in 1949, and later, to great acclaim, in 1981. This complicated literary history and the questions that attend it—which edition represents the real Chesnut? T...

Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women’s experiences and determined their identities. Drawing upon massive research in diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories, the author argues that the lives of antebellum southern women, enslaved and free, differed fundamentally from those of northern women and that it is not possible to understand antebellum southern women by applying ...

Fascinating, incisive, intelligent and never afraid of being controversial, Elaine Showalter introduces us to more than 250 writers. Here are the famous and expected names, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, and Jodi Picoult. And also many successful and acclaimed yet little-known writers, from the early American bestselling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan...

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, hailed in The Washington Post as "a work of enormous imagination and enterprise" and in The New York Times as "an important, original book," Southern Honor revolutionized our understanding of the antebellum South, revealing how Southern men adopted an ancient honor code that shaped their society from top to bottom. Using legal documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper columns, Wyatt-Brown offers fasc...

A foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves over the course of the country's history.Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois a...

With a New Preface, Introduction, and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.New Afterword by Barbara WhiteA fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father...

When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women’s lives became vexed and uncertain.

Uncle Tom charts the dramatic cultural transformation of perhaps the most controversial literary character in American history. From his origins as the heroic, Christ-like protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, Uncle Tom has become a widely recognized epithet for a black person deemed so subservient to whites that he betrays his race. Readers have long noted that Stowe's character is not the trait...

A tour through this New England state and the many writers who have lived and worked there.Connecticut has produced and inspired a dazzling array of literary talent. Helen Keller's adult stomping grounds were the woods and gardens of Easton, while Eugene O'Neill's childhood home in New London found its way into the pages of his greatest work. In this book you'll discover the secret passage to James Merrill's study in Stonington, and navigate Hartford's Nook Farm ne...