Rose Terry Cooke has been called by Jean Downey the first New England "short story writer to make the transition from sentimentalism to the beginnings of realism"--a transition which first became apparent in the mid-1850s in her tales dealing with rural scenes and characters in her native Connecticut. Not only was she one of the earliest New England regionalists in fiction, but she was having her local-color stories published ten years before the 1868 appearance of Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp," which many literary historians credit with initiating the local-color movement. Not all of Cooke's approximately 200 published stories are realistic, but a number of them rank with the best realistic fiction of such New England authors of Cooke's generation as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

Born on a farm six miles outside of Hartford on 17 February 1827, to Henry Wadsworth and Anne Hurlbut...