A. B. Meek, 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 for 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.

The son of Anna McDowell and Samuel Mills Meek, a physician and minister, Alexander Beaufort Meek was born on 17 July 1814 in Columbia, South Carolina, and moved with his family to Alabama in 1819. Here, except for short residences in Athens, Georgia, and Washington, D.C., he made his home for more than forty years, first in Tuscaloosa...