"A fashionable book is apt to be as dull as a fashionable party," James Kirke Paulding wrote in 1823, "simply because neither of them have any approximation to nature." This declaration in Paulding's first novel, Koningsmarke, The Long Finne, A Story of the New World (1823), underscores an insistence upon clarity, simplicity, and fidelity to nature that distinguished Paulding's critical voice throughout a long and prolific career. Though today a nearly forgotten figure in the background of American literature, Paulding was, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, one of the best known and most influential literary names in America. In the 1830s his reputation as a man of letters ranked with those of such luminaries as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. Paulding distinguished himself in virtually every field of literature in America, publishing widely read poems and short stories, novels and plays, satires and...