The old street, keeping its New England Sabbath afternoon so decently under its majestic elms, was as goodly an example of its sort as the late seventies of the century just gone could show. It lay along a north-and-south ridge, between a number of aged and unsmiling cottages, fronting on cinder sidewalks, and alternating irregularly with about as many larger homesteads that...
"John March, Southerner" is a romantic novel criticizing the numerous ills of the Reconstruction-era South, including political corruption, vigilante violence, race riots, and misconceptions of southern honor. Set in the village of Suez in the fictional state of Dixie, the novel revolves around the coming of age of its hero, John March. As a young southerner, March struggles to...
"Throughout that land of water and sky the willow clumps dotting the bosom of every sea-marsh and fringing every rush-rimmed lake were yellow and green in the full flush of a new year, the war year, 'Sixty-one." Set in sultry New Orleans during the Civil War, this novel tells the story of a certain Confederate army artillery unit. It provides an account of the experiences of...
A story of creole life by George W. Cable. 1907. Old New Orleans is truly George Washington Cable’s main character. To be sure, the great Louisiana writer of the late 19th century populates his short stories with fictive personages who possess fascinating characteristics and do interesting things; but what ultimately gives Cable’s work its power is the painstaking accuracy with...
Revealing historical tales of the Southern mystique. “From various necessities of the case I am sometimes the story-teller, and sometimes, in the reader’s interest, have to abridge; but I add no fact and trim naught of value away...In time, place, circumstance, in every essential feature, I give them as I got them — strange stories that truly happened, all partly, some wholly,...
"Behind three or four subtitles and changes of time, scene, characters, this tale of strong hearts is one." "The Solitary," "The Taxidermist," and "The Entomologist" all take place in south Louisiana and include Creole characters, among others. The first is about a timid man with a tortured soul who thinks the world is too big and complex for him. A surprising friendship, a...
Our camp was in the heart of Copiah County, Mississippi, a mile or so west of Gallatin and about six miles east of that once robber-haunted road, the Natchez Trace. Austin's brigade, we were, a detached body of mixed Louisiana and Mississippi cavalry, getting our breath again after two weeks' hard fighting of Grant. Grierson's raid had lately gone the entire length of the...
Next morning he saw her again. He had left his very new law office, just around in Bienville Street, and had come but a few steps down Royal, when, at the next corner below, she turned into Royal, toward him, out of Conti, coming from Bourbon. The same nine-year-old negro boy was at her side, as spotless in broad white collar and blue jacket as on the morning before, and...
Perhaps best known for his first novel, Cable complicates the genre of historical romance in The Grandissimes by providing a realistic portrait of race and class relations in New Orleans immediately following the Louisiana Purchase (1803). A complex novel characterized by numerous sub-plots and Creole dialect, The Grandissimes chronicles the adventures and romances of various...
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