The Hoosier Schoolmaster

📖 The Scoop

"The chapters are short, and the reader's attention is gladly given to their brisk recital of incident and anecdote. The writer's brief closing description of his working habits is likely to be of help to young followers of literature or journalism." -The Dial

"Edward Eggleston, novelist, historian, journalist, and minister of the Gospel...is regarded as a very characteristic product of our American soil." -The Literary Digest

"Mr. Eggleston, who came to the work of fiction writing without the slightest preparation, did nevertheless manage to hit off with marvelous success the men and women of Indiana and Ohio in the early forties. His plots were nothing. In his first and best book, 'The Hoosier Schoolmaster,' he even left a good deal wholly unexplained. He injected this villain slap into the middle of the story without so much as a hint of why he should be plotting against the schoolmaster or even as to who he was. But this made no difference. The story is not the thing: for his men and women, and also his raw boys and his blowsy girls, even his smallest brats, are actually before you, with all their primitive, half-barbaric instincts, their lusty woodland ways, their broad humor, their squalor, and their intensely aboriginal native Americanism." The New York Commercial Advertiser

"An unquestionably fine American dialect novel which was a newcomer some twenty-one years ago. The book abounds in clever and humorous sayings which keep the reader often from tears...The novel has been translated into several foreign languages, and it may be said this work, which the author has treated in such an original and pleasing manner brought him his laurels." -The Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review

"One of the first successful attempts to portray in fiction the rude and rough environment of men and women in the days when the Middle West was still in the making, and it is wonderfully interesting, amusing, and exciting." -New Catholic World

Genre: Fiction / General (fancy, right?)