Eggleston, Edward

Eggleston, Edward (1837–1902), born in Indiana, received a strict Methodist rearing and was educated in country schools. Both influences are important in his later writing. He was successively a Bible agent, a circuit‐riding Methodist minister, a pastor of small churches, and a writer and editor of Sunday school and juvenile magazines. By 1874 he had abandoned Methodism and founded a Church of Christian Endeavor in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was pastor of this “creedless” congregation until 1879, when he retired to devote himself to writing. He was already famous for his novels, particularly The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), marked by a pious sentimentalism but distinguished for its realism in depicting the backwoods country of Indiana. Other fiction includes The End of the World (1872), an Indiana love story, whose background is concerned with the belief of the Millerites in an approaching day of doom; The Mystery of Metropolisville (1873), a melodramatic novel about a real‐estate boom in Minnesota; The Circuit Rider (1874), about a Methodist preacher in Ohio during the early 19th century, distinguished for its realistic exposition of the lawlessness of frontier society; and Roxy (1878), which is set in Indiana during the same period, and vividly contrasts pioneer and “poor‐white” types. Although he considered his fiction to be “a contribution to the history of civilization in America,” he believed didactic historical works to be of greater value and wrote a series of juvenile biographies of such Indian figures as Tecumseh (1878), Pocahontas and Powhatan (1879), and Montezuma (1880), as well as several history texts. Later novels include The Hoosier Schoolboy (1883), a boys' story condemning conditions in rural schools; The Graysons (1888), a historical romance of Illinois, featuring Lincoln's successful defense of an accused murderer; and The Faith Doctor (1891), a satire on wealthy devotees of Christian Science. He also completed two volumes of a history of life in the U.S., which was posthumously published (1904).