Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Long considered an important work, GEORGIA SCENES, printed unproofed, was flawed despite its significance and popularity. In this collection, David Rachels corrects the errors, adds nine previously uncollected "Georgia Scenes" to the original 19, and looks at Longstreet's life and place in Literature. Illustrations.

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870) was a lawyer, judge, state senator, newspaper editor, minister, political propagandist, and college president. He was also a writer who published one of Georgia's first important literary works in 1835, Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, Etc. in the First Half Century of the Republic. John Donald Wade's biography of Longstreet was first published in 1924 but was out of print during most of Wade's lifetime. In this 1969 reissue, M. Thomas Inge provides a bibliography of Wade's published work in addition to an introduction. As Inge notes, this biography was one of the first attempts to assess the cultural background of southern literature and it was the first real effort to investigate the nature of southwestern humor. In the opening chapter Wade announces his theme by saying that the history of Longstreet becomes “an epitome, in some sense, of American civilization.” The biography gradually narrows to a southern focus and as Inge remarks, Wade attempts “to take a panoramic view of the psyche of an entire society through one representative figure.”

Tales of the Georgia frontier by a founder of the Southwest Humour School.

One of the most entertaining genres of American literature is the bold, masculine, wildly exaggerated, and highly imaginative frontier humor of the Old Southwest, produced between 1835 and 1861 in an area that extended from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia westward to Lousiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham have tapped the wealth of this region to produce a collection that over the last three decades has become the standard anthology of Old Southwestern humor. This new, extensively revised edition includes an expanded introduction, a dozen replacement sections, an updated bibliography, and works by three new writers--Phillip B. January, Matthew C. Field, and John Gorman Barr. Most generously represented are George Washington Harris, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Selections from twenty-five authors are featured along with brief biographical essays that combine historical and political analysis with perceptive literary criticism. These selections document important facets of antebellum American culture and provide the background of the literary achievement of Mark Twain and William Faulkner.