More of a public official than novelist, more politician than playwright, James Ewell Heath is still an important early literary figure in Virginia. Heath's work preceded that of many of his more-noted contemporaries John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, George Tucker, and William Alexander Caruthers, and in many ways anticipated their more successful fiction. He published but a single novel and one rather insignificant play, but his Edge-Hill, or, The Family of the Fitzroyals (1828) is an early "plantation novel" and an uncommon work in a society dominated by the issue of slavery.

Although there is no exact record of where, Heath was most likely born in Northumberland County in Virginia, seventy miles east of Richmond on the Chesapeake Bay, to John Heath and Sarah Ewell Heath, on 8 July 1792. John Heath represented Virginia in the third and fourth sessions of Congress but is more remembered as one of the...