The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South

Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 1864-1946Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.1
Word count
625K words
Chapters
63

Tags

English Originals War and Military FictionHistorical Fiction Civil WarHistorical ReappraisalMilitary StrategyRacial IssuesLove EntanglementsComplex HumanitySocial CritiqueRomantic FictionSocial ObservationAmerican South

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South by Jr. Thomas DixonAuthor: Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 1864-1946,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jul 1, 2005

Editor's review

"The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South" is a novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. set against the Civil War; the "gray" in the title refers to the Confederate uniform color and also hints at the work's emotional tone. Dixon was an American popular novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose works often took the North-South conflict and Reconstruction as subjects, marked by strong drama and partisanship. The subtitle "romance" signals a plot-driven historical romance rather than a rigorous historical novel: characters' fates intertwine with factional conflict, suiting readers who want to experience the atmosphere of the era through story. As a free Project Gutenberg eBook, it is easy to obtain and serves as a sample for studying the evolution of North-South narrative in American popular literature. A caution: the author's political and social views are controversial by today's standards; read with critical distance, as a product of its historical context rather than a basis for value judgments.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the preface or learn about Dixon's background first to establish a critical reading framework.
  2. Separate characters' stances from the author's stance and note narrative tendencies.
  3. Read alongside other North-South novels of the same period to observe narrative differences.
  4. For English extensive reading, map out character relationships before entering the plot.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63

FAQ

Is this book a work of history or a novel? According to the source, it is a literary work, with the subtitle “A Romance of North and South,” meaning a romance set against the North-South backdrop rather than a work of historical research. The plot and characters involve fictional and dramatic elements and should not be read as historical fact.
Will the author Dixon’s stance affect the reading? Dixon’s work carries a distinct period stance and a Southern perspective, and its treatment of sides and characters may unsettle modern readers. It is best read as popular literature in its historical context, attending to narrative technique and period attitudes rather than accepting its value judgments.
How difficult is the original English version to read? As a popular novel from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, its language is generally narrative in style but includes old-fashioned expressions and dialect dialogue, posing some challenge for non-native readers. It helps to read chapter summaries and sort out character relationships first, then proceed chapter by chapter, using a dictionary as needed.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 1864-1946 Author

Thomas Dixon, Jr. (1864-1946) was an American writer whose biography and education are limited in publicly available sources; he is known chiefly for his novels set against the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The library holds fourteen of his works, including representative titles such as The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South, The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln, and The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South. Judging from these titles and themes, his writing centers on Southern historical romance and biographical narratives about political figures such as Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, alongside social fiction and drama. His works were popular in the early twentieth century, and The Clansman was later adapted into an influential film, leaving a complex and controversial mark on American racial attitudes of the time.