As early as 1835 had appeared _Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic. By a Native Georgian_, from the pen of Augustus B. Longstreet, graduate of Yale, lawyer, preacher, college president. It was republished in New York in 1840 and from that day it has never been out of print. A realistic, brutal series of sketches it is, full of ear-chewing fights, cruel gougings, horse-racings, horse-swaps, coarse practical jokes, and all the barbarous diversions of a primitive people in a primitive time. Its author apologizes in his preface for the ephemeral character of the book: the stories and sketches, he explains, are "nothing more than fanciful combinations of real incidents and characters." Yet few books of its decade have had more vitality. The author worked first hand in the materials of the life that he himself had seen about him. It is true at every point. Its author, a generation ahead of his times, summed up in one phrase the new realism that was to come: "real people and real incidents in fanciful combinations." Associated with Longstreet in this earlier realistic period of Georgia were Oliver Hillhouse Prince (1787-1837), who contributed to _Georgia Scenes_ "The Militia Drill," a sketch read perhaps by Thomas Hardy before he wrote his _Trumpet-Major_, and William Tappan Thompson (1812-1882), whose _Major Jones's Chronicles_ appeared in book form in Philadelphia in 1840. There was another element in Georgia during the earlier period which had strong influence upon the later group of writers, and allowed it to produce not only Richard Malcolm Johnston and Joel Chandler Harris and "Bill Arp," but poets like Ticknor and Lanier as well. In the cities and larger towns of the State there was an atmosphere of culture unique in the South. Harry Stillwell Edwards would account for it by calling attention to an element usually overlooked: In the late thirties--1839 to be exact--Wesleyan Female College came into being at Macon--the first chartered college for women in the world, and soon began to turn out large classes of highly educated and accomplished graduates. The majority of these came from Georgia, but the whole South has always been represented in Wesleyan. Without going into this subject, I wish to state as my personal opinion that Georgia's literary development, which is undoubtedly more extensive than that of other Southern States, is due to the intellectual and spiritual soil or environment produced by this College in the fifty years of its existence previous to 1890. You will understand how this can be true though the mothers of the State's best known writers may not have been graduates. In my youth, every girl associate I had was of this college. Its atmosphere was everywhere apparent. To-day its graduates lead all over the State.[135]