Novel
Red Rock
Thomas Nelson Page · 1898
Opening lines
The old Gray plantation, “Red Rock,” lay at the highest part of the rich rolling country, before it rose too abruptly in the wooded foothills of the blue mountains away to the westward.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
In a Southern county, at the foot of the mountains, two planter families emerge from the war ruined and try to keep their lands. An agent of the Freedmen's Bureau from the North and the plantation's former overseer, now a justice of the peace, seize the debts and promise the freedmen forty acres and a mule, which the novel presents as a lie. A Ku Klux band forms among the young men of the South, and the estate that gives the book its title changes hands, while romances develop with a family from the North.
Context
The novel first appeared in serial form in Scribner's Magazine from January 1898, then in volume form with Scribner. Its preface asserts that the white people of the South, after seeing their former slaves placed above them, reconquered their region and preserved Anglo-Saxon civilisation. The book presents the Ku Klux in a favourable light and depicts its Black characters with a contempt that Black critics have denounced; Sterling A. Brown saw in Page, in 1937, a forerunner of Thomas Dixon, one of whose novels gave rise in 1915 to The Birth of a Nation. This vision accords with the one that the Dunning school of history, at Columbia, imposed until the 1930s.
Who it is for
A long novel, of nearly six hundred pages, never translated into French, to be read as a document and not as a story, knowing which side the book takes.
Prizes and reception
Ranked among the American bestsellers of 1899, it is now studied as a piece in the file of Southern memory and its racism.
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