Question

9. Name two early Alabama writers and their works. Briefly, what opportunities for education were provided in the state? What was the religious situation of the state?

Answer 1

ANSWER-

• Alabama joined the rare company of states that have contributed a classic not only to American but also to world literature.

• Alabama has a rich literary heritage and can boast of extraordinary literary activity and achievement in the present, including such genres as travel and nature writing, autobiography, and humor, as well as poetry, drama, and fiction

• Early writings emerging from what would become the state of Alabama prefigure a number of literary focuses and forms that would later help define the literary output of the state. André Pénigaut, who wrote about the French presence along the Gulf Coast in the early eighteenth century and has been called Alabama's first literary figure, reported the life and culture of the indigenous peoples of the region

• also did William Bartram in his 1791 Travels, although Bartram directed his interest more toward the native faunaand, especially, flora.

• European-American conflict with Native Americans and specifically the Creek War of 1813-1814 was the subject of more traditional literary efforts, both poetry and prose and both serious and not. Lewis Sewall's The Last Campaign of Sir John Falstaff II, Or, The Hero of the Burnt-Corn Battle; A Serio-Comic Poem appeared in 1815, and the Creekleader William Weatherford was the epic title hero of Alexander Beaufort Meek's The Red Eagle, a lengthy poem in varying verse forms published in New York in 1855 and achieving at least five subsequent editions. The first novel published in Alabama, in 1833, was written by "Don Pedro Cassender" and titled The Lost Virgin of the South; An Historical Novel, Founded on Facts, Connected with the Indian War in the South, in 1812 to '15. A quite different kind of book—humorous, satiric short storieswas Johnson Jones Hooper'swidely read Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845), which grew out of the turbulent period of Indian removal in 1836-37.