Virginia-born James Branch Cabell , along with fellow Richmonder Ellen Glasgow, was one of the first voices of what would later become a rising chorus of modern southern writers. He is recognized today as a pioneering novelist and short-story writer of the southern literary renaissance. Cabell was descended from venerable Virginia stock. His father, Robert Gamble Cabell II, was the scion of a long-established Old Dominion family which had produced one governor, Cabell's great-grandfather. Cabell's mother, Anne Branch Cabell, belonged to a solidly bourgeois family with comfortable fortunes resting on mercantile and banking interests.

Born on 14 April 1879, Cabell grew up in post-Civil War Richmond. He was nourished by children's books, especially Charles Henry Hanson's Stories of the Days of King Arthur (1882). Not surprisingly these Arthurian legends became inextricably bound in his youthful imagination with equally romantic tales of the exploits of the South's Confederate heroes. The noble King Arthur...