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Alabama Writers in the 19th Century

Although Alabama was raw frontier territory during much of the first half of the nineteenth century, its writers were participants in major movements and developments of national American literature and culture of the nineteenth century:

• Romantic literature

• An example is Alexander Beaufort Meek (1814-1865), whose lyrical epic poem The Red Eagle (about Creek chief William Weatherford) was published the same year (1855) as Longfellow's Hiawatha and Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

• Old Southwest humor

• The works of Johnson Jones Hooper (1815-1862) and Joseph Glover Baldwin (1816-1864) important contributions to this kind of funny, raucous, realistic fiction that was an important influence on later writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

• Popular "domestic sentimental" fiction

• Caroline Lee Hentz (1800-1856) and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson (1836-1909) two of the most successful, best-selling authors of novels of "sensibility;" criticized at the time by Nathaniel Hawthorne but recognized today as important feminist writers.

• Civil War literature

• Both Hentz and Wilson wrote novels that were sectional propagandistic responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Hentz, The Planter's Northern Bride, 1854; Evans, Macaria, 1863.

• The anti-Confederate Tobias Wilson: A Tale of the Great Rebellion (1865) by Union loyalist Jeremiah Clemens (1814-1865), a relative of Mark Twain's and former U.S. Senator from Alabama, was one of the first Civil War novels to appear in print.

• In Montgomery, Confederate-veteran brothers Clifford Lanier (1844-1908) and Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) each wrote a novel based on his war experiences: Clifford Lanier: Thorn-Fruit, 1867; Sidney Lanier: Tiger-Lilies, 1867.

• Local-color fiction

• Admired by Joel Chandler Harris, Idora McClellan Plowman Moore (1843-1929) wrote many sketches about rural Alabamians under the pen name Betsy Hamilton.

• Robert Wilton Burton (1848-1917) and Martha Young (1862-1941), directly in the "Uncle Remus" tradition, published entertaining stories that incorporated much folklore from rural and small-town Alabama.