SOURCE: Stephens, Robert O. “Genealogy of a Southern Family Saga.” In The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies, pp. 14-39. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Stephens probes the literary precursors of George Washington Cable's novel The Grandissimes and discusses the work as the first fully-realized family saga in Southern literature.

When George Washington Cable produced the first authentic southern family saga in 1879, his book had a long literary lineage. As a family saga, The Grandissimes had early forebears such as the English country-house poems and country-house sketches, as well as family-centered novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As in a family genealogy, some of the early ancestors demonstrated latent qualities that, combined with others, would become dominant through time and generations. The development of the saga is analogous to development of a family in which “the genetic make-up alters with...