Primarily a lawyer, politician, and businessman, Kennedy made a significant contribution to an emerging national literature in the 1830s with three volumes of fiction set in the South. The first of these, Swallow Barn, a sort of sketchbook of Virginia country life, is considered one of the pioneer works in the creation of the "plantation novel." Horse-Shoe Robinson celebrated the national epic period, the American Revolution; its titular hero, a Southern frontiersman, for a while rivaled James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo in the affection of readers. A second historical romance, Rob of the Bowl, was set in seventeenth-century Maryland; it explored the religious and political tensions of a past age which still had relevance in the present. After the publication of Quodlibet, a satirical "history" of Jacksonianism, Kennedy restricted his writing to biography, essays, and political tracts. In his plot lines and characterizations, he was not highly original...