De Forest, John William [key], 1826–1906, American author, b. Seymour, Conn. He served in the Civil War, chiefly as a captain. His vivid accounts of battle scenes in Louisiana and Sheridan's Shenandoah valley campaign, published in Harper's Monthly, were among the finest contemporaneous war records. Best known as a novelist, he was the author of Kate Beaumont (1872), a study of South Carolina culture, and Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1876), the first realistic novel of the Civil War.
See A Volunteer's Adventures (ed. by J. H. Croushore, 1946); biography by F. Bergmann (1971); study by J. F. Light (1965).
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