George Tucker was a novelist, member of the U.S. Congress, historian, biographer, statistician, political economist, and professor at the University of Virginia. His work in history and political science has always been familiar to scholars in those fields, but only since the last decades of the twentieth century has his fiction received serious critical interest for its role in the tradition of southern plantation literature.

George Tucker, the son of Daniel Tucker, was born 29 August 1775 on St. George's Island in the Bermudas into a prosperous and well-established merchant family. He was tutored privately and read law. After the death of his mother, Elizabeth Tucker, in 1795 Tucker immigrated to the United States to further his education and to begin his career. Upon arriving in the United States, Tucker first visited Philadelphia and then traveled to see his kinsman St. George Tucker, a wealthy landowner, a poet of some...