John Esten Cooke is usually thought of as a writer who ended one literary tradition and initiated another. Beginning his career as an imitator of James Fenimore Cooper and an author of pre-Revolutionary War fiction, Cooke became known, after serving four years as a staff officer in the Confederate army, chiefly as a writer of Civil War novels and biographer of the leading generals of the South. Whereas he had earlier championed the rights of man and included common people as heroes, after the war he became, as did fellow Virginian Thomas Nelson Page, one of the most prominent spokesmen of the Old South movement. In this role Cooke not only lauds the heroism of Confederate soldiers such as Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and Turner Ashby, unrelentingly romanticizing their exploits, but moves from a prodemocratic to a proaristocratic stance, extolling the virtues of "high-born" Virginia...