Richard Malcolm Johnston holds an important place in that improbable line of nineteenth and twentieth-century writers of short fiction who emerged from central Georgia to win national acclaim. From Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, this unusual literary succession moves to William Tappan Thompson and Charles Henry Smith (Bill Arp), through Johnston to Joel Chandler Harris and Harry Stillwell Edwards, and to Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker, women who reveal their middle-Georgia roots as strikingly as any of their male predecessors. Johnston, at the height of his popularity, from the early 1880s through the mid 1890s, had as big a name as any. He was a maker as well as a major beneficiary of the vogue of local-color fiction, that curious, phenomenal blend of romanticism and realism that so enthralled America's reading public. Beginning a professional writing career at the age of fifty-seven and bursting into national prominence when he was...