Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 4B

15. Albion W. Tourgée, “The South as a Field for Fiction,” Forum (December 1888): 404-13.

Discussion of the South, slavery, and the Civil War as rich sources of material for novelists. Although he served in the Union army during the Civil War, and although he was a successful writer of fiction with a Northern perspective (e.g., A Fool’s Errand and Bricks without Straw), the author acknowledges a preference for Confederate themes and characters. “A foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America, and the African the chief romantic element of our population.” This article was written almost fifty years before the publication of Gone with the Wind.