Old Books Provide Novelists With an Area’s Local Color
A Tallahassee Girl, published in 1882 by Maurice Thompson (S
eptember 9, 1844 – February 15, 1901) is listed on Amazon as fiction. It reads more like non-fiction, and perhaps that has the author’s intent. Thompson was a busy naturalist who turned to writing books. You can read the story for free by checking this information page. The original cover is shown here (right) and the current cover displayed on Amazon is shown on the left.
I did not buy the book at Amazon’s $30 price, choosing to go to one of the free sites. As fiction, I found the story to be a plodding experience. Yet, if I were writing novels that touched on the early days of Florida’s capital city, I might find value in one of the free versions where I could take notes like a student in a history class. For a dash of local color, you can say in your story that a visitor to a friend’s house saw this book on the shelf potentially with others by Thompson.
You can find an overview of Thompson’s work in The Library of Southen Literature where the author likes his poetry best. Wikipedia’s entry begins: “James Maurice Thompson was an American novelist, poet, essayist, archer, and naturalist.” He was quite prolific and is probably best known for two books about archery and for his bestseller Civil War novel Alice of Old Vincennes.
Looking for local color takes a novelist on interesting journeys. I learned about this author while reading about the “so-called” Florida Volcano!
