Cultural scholars often group T. S. Arthur with other didactic and reform writers as an author representative of those who fed the literary mainstream in the mid nineteenth century. Two popular works of temperance fiction, however, set his name somewhat apart. The first of these, Six Nights with the Washingtonians: A Series of Original Temperance Tales (1842), is a series of tales prompted by Arthur's attendance at early meetings of the Washington Temperance Society in Baltimore. The second, better-known work--Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There (1854)--gives a graphic narration of the career of a small-town tavern and the devastation it causes in the lives of the townspeople. The latter of these two works has frequently been labeled the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the nineteenth-century temperance movement--a moral crusade that ultimately led to Prohibition in the United States. In conjunction with Arthur's many contributions to...