John Beauchamp Jones was a popular novelist (particularly of the West and the South) and a well-connected literary editor and political journalist in the two decades leading up to the Civil War. Jones's fiction and activities as an editor attracted the attention of other literary notables of the period, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. His early novels, Wild Western Scenes: A Narrative of Adventures in the Western Wilderness, Forty Years Ago (1841), The Western Merchant: A Narrative . . . (1849), and Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of His Exploits at Home, during His Travels, and in the Cities; Designed to Amuse and Instruct (1854), capture the picturesque and generally Edenic qualities of the West, where he spent his early years. His novels commend the honesty of "the People" and predict their abiding success, hearkening back to the democratic republicanism of Thomas Jefferson and to the enterprising...