Yankee Doric: America Before the Civil WarA Novel by Burton Raffel
America’s war against itself developed slowly, pressing on people in all walks and ways of life. The Bingham family—of New England, then rural New York, then the great city of New York—was, like everyone else, caught up in deep, churning passions. The Bingham men, as they struggle toward the lives and loves they long for, reach into realms of commerce, politics, diplomacy, journalism. Bingham women, almost too strong for the roles society imposes, strive to be as they see themselves. Though fictive, their stories are historical reincarnations, since Yankee Doric mirrors faithfully the age and its people.
“Dramatizing the times of Jefferson, John Brown, and Horace Greeley, Yankee Doric recovers the feverish restlessness of a newly-formed nation growing from isolation to world position. Through a family’s search for meaning in the face of illness, infidelities, death, the vagaries of politics and the looming possibility of civil war, the novel presents a portrait of the young nation and its citizens. The language is so fine that details become images; giving scope to the national experience and stature to its characters, these images fuse into the ideas that created the United States of America and, still, enable it to endure.”
—Linda Ty-Casper, author of DreamEden and Awaiting Trespass
