De Forest, John William (1826-1906), was an American novelist. He is considered one of the early Realists in American fiction. The Realists revolted against a romantic, idealized portrayal of life.
De Forest was born on May 31, 1826, in Humphreysville (now Seymour), Connecticut. After traveling in Europe, he became a captain in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861-1865). In 1866 and 1867, De Forest was district commander of the Freedman’s Bureau in Greenville, South Carolina. The bureau was created by Congress to help the slaves freed at the end of the war. De Forest’s best novel was Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), a realistic treatment of the Civil War. De Forest also wrote Kate Beaumont (1872), a novel about South Carolina life, as well as novels about political corruption. His jarring combination of realism and conventional love plots kept him from gaining a wide audience in his day. But De Forest’s unflinching descriptions of war and keen observations of Southern life before the war foreshadowed later antiromantic developments in American literature. The frank portrayal of soldiers in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion probably influenced American novelist Stephen Crane in his famous unsentimental war novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895). De Forest died on July 17, 1906.
