The writer who called himself Charles Sealsfield was the first important author of fiction about the United States in the German language. German interest in the New World dates virtually from the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration, and it generated a large body of writing--some of it informational, some fanciful--along with motifs and allusions in the works of many writers, among them Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. But Sealsfield was the first to write ambitious novels in German from an American perspective. He became a highly visible and much discussed writer shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century, after which his reputation declined to that of a curiosity on the periphery of literary history; in recent decades interest in him has intensified, and he is once again a topic of lively inquiry and dispute.

Sealsfield lived a mysterious, masked life, and there is much about him that is not...