The Hoosier Schoolmaster: A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana is an 1871 novel by the American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 author Edward Eggleston

Edward Eggleston

Edward Eggleston was an American historian and novelist.-Biography:Eggleston was born in Vevay, Indiana, to Joseph Cary Eggleston and Mary Jane Craig. As a child, he was too ill to regularly attend school, so his education was primarily provided by his father. He became an ordained Methodist...

. The novel, which began as a series of stories written for Hearth and Home, a periodical edited by Eggleston, was based on the experiences of his brother, George Cary Eggleston

George Cary Eggleston

George Cary Eggleston American author and brother of fellow author Edward Eggleston . Sons of Joseph Cary Eggleston and Mary Jane Craig. After the American Civil War he published a serialized account of his time as a Confederate soldier in the The Atlantic Monthly...

, who had been a schoolteacher in Indiana

Indiana

Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

. The novel is noted for its realistic depictions of 19th-century American rural life and for its use of local dialect.

Evaluation

In the conclusion to The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Eggleston announces his belief that readers whose taste is not perverted always want a story to “come out well.” Accordingly, he so planned this his first and most important romance that the lovers are all happily united, the poor orphans become prosperous and the evil-doers receive just punishment, mitigated somewhat through the generous intervention of those whom they have wronged. The great popularity The Hoosier Schoolmaster has been ascribed not so much to the conventional plot as to its description of early days in Indiana. It pictures the country school in which custom prescribed a constant warfare between the master and the big boys, the community spelling school, the different forms of bigoted and illiterate preaching that were offered to the new settlers, the amusing attempts at formality in the proceedings of the courts, and other features of pioneer life as the author had seen them in his career as itinerant missionary and agent for a Bible society. Eggleston's fondness for historical accuracy sometimes led him to sacrifice the artistic unity of his story in order to introduce a detail exactly as it was found in real life, but this defect is less noticeable in The Hoosier Schoolmaster than in some of his later novels. There is a great variety of characters who, while they are drawn pretty much in unshaded black and white, have enough truth to human nature to seem real. A sufficient humor pervades the whole, the action never drags, and the book despite its limitations deserved the great vogue it had after its publication in 1871.