Best remembered as author of The Hoosier School-Master (1871), Edward Eggleston contributed significantly to the acceptance of realism by American readers and critics and, together with Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, to the emergence of the Middle West as a major literary region. But Eggleston did not keep pace with these two contemporaries either during his lifetime or later; although his novels are still in print, they attract relatively few readers and have little interest for literary historians. Eggleston's creative powers were not great. He showed little advance toward mastery of his craft, and he seldom departed from a formula that called for excessive reliance on local color, folk customs, and popular superstitions. Restless in nature, he changed course often: at different stages he was a successful preacher, an expert on Sunday schools, a Washington lobbyist (for copyright reforms), and the author of pioneering works in American social...