Fiction
Tucker is probably best remembered for his 1836 novel The Partisan Leader. Set in the United States of 1849, the story depicts a war between secessionist guerrillas in Virginia and a despotic federal government led by President-turned-dictator Martin Van Buren. In Tucker's future, the slaveholding states south of Virginia have already seceded, driven out of the Union by Van Buren's centralizing government and exploitative tariff policy. While the Old Dominion itself remains under federal control, the plot of The Partisan Leader concerns the efforts of patriotic Virginian irregulars to defeat government forces and join the independent Southern Confederacy.
At the onset of the American Civil War, the novel was regarded by many in the North and South as a prophetic vision of the collapse of the Union. It was republished in 1861 in New York with the subtitle "A Key to the Southern Conspiracy"; a Richmond edition of 1862 is subtitled "A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy."
Tucker was also the author of George Balcombe, also published in 1836, which Edgar Allan Poe called "the best American novel." In 1844-1845, Tucker's third and final novel, Gertrude, was serialized in the Southern Literary Messenger.
Read more about this topic: Nathaniel Beverly Tucker
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“... fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)