Alexander Beaufort Meek (17 July 1814-1 November 1865), lawyer, legislator, editor, orator, historian, and poet, stands among the first of Alabama writers both in time and influence. Well known in literary circles of the South, he was an intellectual, cultural, and political leader of his state during the two and a half decades before the Civil War. Although something of a dilettante who never got what he considered his most important work into print, he affords as interesting, impressive, and pure an example of the romantic literary nationalist as the Old Southwest of the nation had to offer.

Born in 1814 in Columbia, South Carolina, Meek moved with his family to Alabama in 1819. Here, except for a short residency in Washington, D.C., he made his home for over forty years, first in Tuscaloosa and then Mobile, the cultural centers of the state. In 1863 he moved to Columbus, Mississippi, where, still...