James Tandy Ellis has delighted all with his dialect stories in "Sprigs o' Mint." Mrs. Fannie Caldwell Macauley (Frances Little) has written "The Lady of the Decoration," while "Aunt Jane of Kentucky" by Mrs. Eliza Calvert Obenchain (Eliza Calvert Hall) has attracted universal attention.
John Wilson Townsend in "Kentuckians in History and Literature" and "Kentucky in American Letters" has done a great work for an appreciative public.
Madison Cawein.
William C. Watts' "Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement" is a great pen picture of early times; and Irvin S. Cobb's "Back Home" and "Cobb's Anatomy" have won him undying fame as a story teller and humorist.
In other lines of prose we find John Bradford's "Notes on Kentucky," histories of the state by Marshall, Lewis and R.H. Collins, Z.F. Smith, Elizabeth Kinkead, and Ed Porter Thompson; also the works of Humphrey Marshall, Mann Butler, Thomas Corwin, Fornatus Cosby, Samuel D. Gross, Henry Watterson, Bennett H. Young, and others.
Since our first poet, Thomas Johnson, there have been many who have won credit in verse.
Theodore O'Hara's immortal elegy, "The Bivouac of the Dead" is known to all. John Wilson Townsend has called Madison Cawein the successor of Sidney Lanier; Edmund Gosse calls him the "hermit thrush," while others have named him the "Kentucky Keats." Cale Young Rice has won fame in dramatic verse. Thomas H. Chivers, a native of Georgia, spent some time in Kentucky. He accused Poe of stealing some of his words in "The Raven" from him.
Robert Burns Wilson, the poet-painter, has published several volumes of the highest merit. Bishop John L. Spalding, William O. Butler, Fornatus Cosby, Jr., George D. Prentice, Sarah T. Bolton, Mary E. Betts, Henry T. Stanton, Sarah N. Piatt, and a host of others have written verse that will compare favorably with that of many writers more renowned.