Early 19th-century Alabama was a society still in the making. Now Philip Beidler tells how the first books written and published in the state influenced the formation of Alabama's literary and political culture. As Beidler shows, virtually overnight early Alabama found itself in possession of the social, political, and economic conditions required to jump start a traditional literary culture in the old Anglo-European model: property-based class relationships, large concentrations of personal wealth, and professional and merchant classes of similar social, political, educational, and literary views.

“Thoroughly researched and copiously documented, First Books is an original and provocative contribution to Southern studies. Beidler’s book shows how the first writers of one Southern state created through their books an image of their culture that conformed to dominant sociopolitical assumptions of the time. Equally significant, his book also implicitly provides a viable foundation for considering the validity of cultural mythmaking as it may pertain to the first books produced in other states of the antebellum South.”
—South Atlantic Review