Though no longer widely read, William Alexander Caruthers remains an important figure in the literary history of the South. Both his near contemporary John Esten Cooke and his biographer Curtis Carroll Davis maintain that Caruthers was the first significant Virginia novelist, but his importance is larger. Though often dwarfed by John Pendleton Kennedy, William Gilmore Simms, and Cooke, Caruthers contributed to the flourishing of Southern fiction before the Civil War. In The World of Washington Irving (1944), Van Wyck Brooks goes so far as to assert that "Caruthers was the father" of the Southern romancers. He was undoubtedly one of the creators of plantation fiction and perhaps the first novelist to promote agrarianism.

As an early practitioner of plantation fiction, Caruthers often caricatures blacks, dividing them into solemn, dignified household slaves and boisterous, comic minstrels. Despite these stereotypes of the genre, Caruthers also created slave characters who are more...