John Esten Cooke

John Esten Cooke, pictured here in an undated photograph, was a novelist, biographer, and veteran of the American Civil War (1861–1865). One of the most important literary figures of nineteenth-century Virginia, Cooke was the prolific author of historical adventures and romances in the tradition of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. Cooke saw himself as a critic of aristocracy, but that criticism was rarely particularly sharp, and after the Civil War, his work unselfconsciously glorified the Confederacy in the tradition of the Lost Cause.