During his lifetime, and throughout the half century of neglect that followed his early death, Harold Frederic was classified variously as a regionalist, a realist, a naturalist, and a pioneer in the revival of American historical fiction. Though criticized for employing newspaper standards, and hasty composition, as well as for leading an unconventional life, he eventually earned a firm place in literary history with The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), the book for which he is best remembered and which has dominated the critical attention he has received in the past eighty years. Everett Carter, who sees Theron Ware's rise from ignorance to knowledge as both tragic and beneficent, views the novel as almost an allegory of the psychic fall of Americans and places it "among the four or five best novels written by an American during the nineteenth century."

Frederic was born in the Mohawk Valley city of...