The Beauchamp-Sharp tragedy of 1825 was the one Kentucky event that kindled the imaginations of more alien writers than any other happening in our history. Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, Charles Fenno Hoffman, G. P. R. James, James Hall, and several others, wrote plays, novels, and poems based upon this tragedy. In 1832 James Kirke Paulding, the friend of Washington Irving, published one of the earliest Kentucky romances, entitled _Westward Ho!_ which name he got from the old Elizabethan drama of John Webster and Thomas Dekker. Two years after the appearance of Paulding's tale, William A. Caruthers, the Virginia novelist, printed _The Kentuckian in New York_; and in the same year Thomas Chandler Haliburton ("Sam Slick"), put forth one of his earliest works, _Kentucky, a Tale_ (London, 1834). In 1845 Charles Winterfield's _My First Days With the Rangers_, appeared, to be followed the next year by William T. Porter's _A Quarter Race in Kentucky_.
These writers hardly did more than point the way to Kentucky for Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose world-famous novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ (Boston, 1852), was set against a background of slave-holding Kentucky. This is the most famous example our literature affords of a writer of another state or country coming to Kentucky for the materials out of which to build a book.
In 1860 David Ross Locke, the Ohio journalist and satirist, discovered the _Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby_, postmaster at "Confedrit X Roads, Kentucky," and his political satires on Kentucky, the _Nasby Letters_, tickled the readers of his paper, _The Toledo Blade_, through many years. These alleged communications from poor Petroleum may be read to-day in Locke's _Swingin' Round the Cirkel_, and _Ekkoes from Kentucky_. J. G. Marshall's _The Outlaw Brothers_ (New York, 1864); Miss Martha Remick's _Millicent Halford: a Tale of the Dark Days of Kentucky in the year 1861_ (Boston, 1865); two novels by Edward Willett, entitled _Kentucky Border Foes_, and _Old Honesty: a Tale of the Early Days of Kentucky_, both of which were issued in the late sixties; Constance F. Woolson's _Two Women_ (New York, 1877), and Mrs. Anna Bowman Dodd's story, _Glorinda_ (Boston, 1888), concludes the group of writers of the comparatively modern school who did not linger long in the "meadowland," but who found it good literary soil, and helped themselves accordingly.