Georgia Scenes: Characters, Incidents &c. in the First Half Century of the Republic

Longstreet is remembered for one book, "Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, & etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic" (1835), a collection of humorous, racy newspaper sketches of the life of Middle Georgia during the early nineteenth century. Though not the first, it was the most important and most influential early attempt to translate into print those traditions of storytelling and verbal wit that had characterized frontier life in the United States. Here were the beginnings in literature of the vernacular tradition, the humor of the Old Southwest, whose vitality would be one of the mainsprings of the works of Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Longstreet, a lawyer, educator, and writer, was in most respects an outsider to the world he so colorfully described in "Georgia Scenes." An educated, conservative, even moralistic individual, his duties as a circuit court judge had taken him to rural settlements where he was able to observe the lives of ordinary country people at work and play. His aim in writing down his observations "was to supply a chasm in history which has always been overlooked---the manners, customs, amusements, wit, dialect, as they appear in all grades of society to an eye and ear witness of them." Edgar Allan Poe praised Longstreet for his "penetrating understanding of character in general, and of Southern character in particular." About "Georgia Scenes," Bernard De Voto, the preeminent historian of the American frontier, had this to say: "In some respects, Longstreet's successors never equaled him, in many respects they never surpassed him, and his book remains today vital and absorbing---the frontier's first permanent work."