Johnson Jones Hooper (9 June 1815-7 June 1862), lawyer, journalist, and politician, earned his place in American literature by creating Captain Simon Suggs of Tallapoosa, Alabama, a character both "engaging and despicable," and by writing one of the most quoted sentences in Southwest humor: "It is good to be shifty in a new country." He was born at Wilmington, North Carolina, the son of Charlotte DeBerniere and Archibald Maclaine Hooper; his mother, of Charleston, South Carolina, was descended from French Huguenots, and his father, a lawyer, planter, and editor of the Cape-Fear Recorder, traced his ancestry to Scotland and included among his kinsmen a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Hooper died on 7 June 1862, probably of tuberculosis, at Richmond, Virginia, where he was serving with the Confederate government. He was buried at Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond.

Archibald Hooper and Charlotte DeBerniere were married on 8 June 1806 and between 1809 and 1815 had six...