The Choir Invisible

Kentucky in the 1790s: a schoolmaster on the frontier, a woman he cannot have, and a country between the wilderness and the law. Allen grew up on a Kentucky farm ruined by the Civil War and spent his career writing the state into American literature — its hemp fields, its woods, its stiff-necked people. This 1897 novel was the bestseller of its year, and the restraint in it is the point. Fifty-eight plates, among them Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand, carry the forest and water scenes that shadow every page of this Kentucky story.