Among the host of "Old Southwest" humorists who flourished during the first half of the nineteenth century, Johnson Jones Hooper looms as one of the most important and distinctive. With the publication of Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with "Taking the Census," and Other Alabama Sketches (1846), Hooper gave to nineteenth-century literature the epitome of the rascally, unprincipled, conniving, and uncouth backwoodsman, a creation that influenced many other writers, including Mark Twain, and informed the whole American literary tradition of the "confidence man."

While Hooper is associated with Alabama, the state in which he rose to fame as an author as well as attained success as journalist, lawyer, and politician, he was actually a native of North Carolina. Born in the tidewater town of Wilmington on 9 June 1815, he was the sixth child and third son of Archibald Hooper--lawyer, solicitor, and newspaper editor--and...