First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

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First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama. By Philip D. Beidler. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 1999. Pp. xii, 185. $34.95, ISBN 0-8173-0985-3.)

Philip D. Beidler's First Books is a case study of the relationship between literature and social ideology in antebellum Alabama. Beidler studies literary creations by "Alabamians" ranging in time and tone from Lewis Sewall, who published a satirical poem about The Hero of the Burnt-Corn Battle in 1815, to Daniel R. Hundley, who published Social Relations in Our Southern States in 1860. Beidler delves deeply and with multifaceted analysis into the major productions of Joseph Clover …