When the nineteenth-century, Mississippi-born author Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell earns mention in American literary history, it is usually on the basis of the short fiction she published in national--that is, northern--magazines between 1875 and 1884. Most often praised as a humorist and as one of the first and foremost creators of local-color dialect fiction, she and her work faded from memory as literary tastes shifted. Scholars interested in her career have lamented how little work she left when her life was cut short by cancer at age thirty-four. However, the breadth of Bonner's achievement is being reappraised as previously buried works have been rediscovered and delivered into the hands of interested readers. A comprehensive estimation of her literary career must include primary texts long slighted because they have been largely inaccessible: a range of short fiction, a novella, a novel, two series of journalistic travel letters, celebrity profiles, historical/autobiographical...