Romances. Like many Northern novelists, Southern writers were strongly influenced by the popular historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, whose ideas they adapted to specific Southern themes and locations. Marylander John P. Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832), the first significant plantation novel, was a novel of manners that contained favorable descriptions of local differences (including slavery) offered by a fictional Northern visitor. William A. Caruthers's novels The Cavaliers of Virginia (1834-1835) and The Knights of the Horse-Shoe (1845) were historical romances set in Southern locales. Another of Caruthers's novels, The Kentuckian in New York (1834), showed Northerners traveling south and Southerners traveling north; it incorporated descriptions of scenery from both regions into several love stories involving the travelers.

Simms. William Gilmore Simms was the South's most prolific author. A resident of Charleston, South Carolina, Simms wrote novels, essays, poetry, and short stories, all treating...