This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: …vi. (1908.) New researches and discoveries have recently been made in Sealsfield biography by A. Ravize1 of Bordeaux, who will soon publish a monograph on the subject. favorite Sealsfield. The novels of this writer described types of American character such as had existed between 1820 and 1840. He arrested them at the moment of their highest development, before devouring time had blurred their features. The dauntless squatter and sturdy pioneer, the Southern planter and patriarchal slaveholder, the grasping millionaire and his emissaries, the New York dandy and the society belle, the taciturn sea-captain and the hot-blooded Kentuckian, the Texan alcalde and the desperado fugitive from justice, these types have been endowed with enduring life in Sealsfield’s Trans-Atlantic Sketches,
The Cabin Book,
Morton, and other fascinating story-books. Sealsfield’s types of early Americans ought to be as familiar, at least to the German-American, as Bret Harte’s early Californians, Cooper’s brave mariners, George Cable’s Creoles, or Hawthorne’s Puritans. Sealsfield’s tales are infinitely more readable than the extravaganzas of William Gilmore Simms, and his appreciative view of American conditions is exceptional among European travelers in this country at that time. Sealsfield was proud to call himself a citizen of the United States; though he went back to work and die in Switzerland, he clung to the proud title inscribed on his tombstone: Burger von Nordamerika. The very purpose of his books was to hold up to view the vigorous, self-reliant types of American manhood as models of imitation for the cultivated European.1 1 Cf. Charles Sealsfield (Carl Postl), Der Dichter beider Hemispharen, sein Leben und…