§8. Judge Beverley Tucker. VII. Fiction II. Vol. 15. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XV. Colonial and Revolutionary Literature; Early National Literature, Part I.

VII. Fiction II.

§ 8. Judge Beverley Tucker.

South of the Potomac there were relatively few novelists during Cooper’s lifetime. The great tradition of Virginia was sustained by her orators and scholars rather than by her writers of fiction, but Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851) was both scholar and novelist. His George Balcombe (1836) Poe thought the best novel by an American; his Partisan Leader (1836), primarily famous because it prophesied disunion, is clearly a notable though little known work. No other American of the time wrote with such classical restraint and pride as Tucker. No book, of any time, surpasses The Partisan Leader for intense, conscious Virginianism.