Guy Vernon: A Novelette in Verse

(Paperback)

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Guy Vernon is a novelette in verse portraying an unhappy marriage between North and South on the eve of the Civil War. Guy Vernon, a dashing plantation owner, takes as his wife a penniless young charmer named Florinda whom he meets at the Saratoga balls. Soon estranged, they are joined in their travels around New Orleans, Havana, and the abolitionist North by Vernon's freed black manservant, Saturn, a "mulatto" dandy who exerts a mysterious power over his former master, and by Florinda's previous suitor, Rob Lorne, a journalist and would-be poet. Back in print for the first time since 1878, Guy Vernon reemerges as a lost classic of American literature, one that both reflects and criticizes the social and literary conventions of its time.

Reviews

"One of the wittiest and most winning narrative poems since its great precursors, Pope's Rape of the Lock and Byron's Don Juan. Guy Vernon really is what its champion William Logan claims: a forgotten if minor masterpiece." The Washington Post

Author Bio

John Townsend Trowbridge (18271916) was a novelist, poet, and pro-abolition polemicist. As a young man, he served briefly as editor of Benjamin Perley Poores newspaper the Sentinel. Largely overlooked now, he wrote hit plays and was a prolific author of childrens stories. He was a friend of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whitman.

William Logan is the author of eight volumes of poetry and five books of essays and reviews, including The Undiscovered Country, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He is the Alumni/ae Professor of English at the University of Florida.