Page,
Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began
to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of
plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the
men were brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the
dogs lazier and the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more
entrancing than today. Miss Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed
city-dwellers and country-folk alike by her novels of the
Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted lovingly the
hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines of the
decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and
local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students
of the immense divergence of American types, owed much of its
vitality to the talent of Southern writers.
But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the
seventies Edward Eggleston wrote "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" and
"The Circuit Rider," faithful and moving presentations of genuine
pioneer types which were destined to pass with the frontier
settlements.
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