Postbellum
After being mustered out of the army with the rest of the Veteran Reserve Corps of which he was the adjutant general, De Forest transferred to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (more commonly known as the "Freedmen's Bureau" and was appointed Assistant Commissioner in charge of the post in Greenville, South Carolina. His experiences there, published in magazines of the period and eventually in collected form as A Union Officer in the Reconstruction (1948, new edition LSUP 1999) shed light on the conditions in the South during the Reconstruction.
His magazine articles of his time in the army were also collected published posthumously as A Volunteer's Adventures (1946, new edition LSUP 2001).
In 1867, De Forest published his most significant novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. William Dean Howells praised him as a "realist before realism was named," but most early critics argued that the Romantic elements of De Forest's plot mixed poorly with the admirable realism of the battle scenes, and the novel fell through with the audience in 1867. Reeditions in 1939 and 1956 reintroduced De Forest as an author, but the full range of his experimentalísm in this early novel has still not been fully understood. In Miss Ravenel's Conversion, De Forest tried to come to grips with writing experiences De Forest himself had, and which did not fit any of the idealist and romantic patterns that war literature had followed so far. Consequently, there are a number of scenes that portray war with a graphic sense of bloody reality (f. i. the siege of Port Hudson), but there are also burlesque and comical passages, as well as reflective moments.
Writing for The Nation a year later, De Forest called for a more general movement in American literature toward realism; the essay's title, "The Great American Novel," is generally credited as being the first known use of the term.
He died in New Haven, Connecticut, of heart disease.
Read more about this topic: John William De Forest