Look Back to Glory

By Herbert Ravenel Sass

In 1859, after a dozen years in the diplomatic service, Richard Acton returns home to Avalon, his family's Lowcountry home. He rides through a mist of fateful foreboding hanging over the shadow-darkened pine woods and moss-draped live oaks. World weary from his travels that included time in Czarist Russia and in Paris, Acton is shocked to find the quiet beauty of the Lowcountry shattered by wild talk of secession. Thus the stage is set by Barbara L. Bellows in her introduction to this re-edition of Herbert Ravenel Sass's Look Back to Glory, a classic Southern novel of antebellum memories and Civil War and Reconstruction realities originally published in 1933. Written during the period of southern literary renaissance, Look Back to Glory takes a unique look at the Civil War and its consequences for the economy of the South. When many of his contemporaries were perpetuating a view of the South as morally and intellectually inferior, Sass posited that the antebellum South held an agricultural and economic wisdom that the country could learn from as it struggled through bankruptcy and depression in the 1930s.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1596290323
• ISBN13: 9781596290327
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: History Press (SC)
• Length: 446 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.0" x 6.7"

Customer Reviews

The Golden Age of the Carolina Low-Country

"High-mettled men who still lived by the Code and thought it necesary to fight duels in the dawn over inconsequential points of honor, because they believed that no point of honor could be inconsequential. Lovely women who lived by a southern tradition that will be a strength for generations. The city-state of Charleston and its surrounding plantations, unlike any other community in the world, unique and dramatic. Great houses, fine horses, careless dandies, black slaves, tournaments, hunts, dances, high-minded statesmen, hard-working planters, fine lidies doing good among the slaves. The river, the pine-wood, the live-oaks and magnolias, the trailing Spanish moss, graceful herons and fantastic ibises--a land whose brooding mystery and fateful foreboding loveliness become part of one's very soul. For its rullers, at any rate, the most delightful land under the sun. The clouds and the reality of war. The iron-clads of the North, battering at the brick walls of Fort Sumter. The love of Richard Acton and Diane Rowland, to be read by lightning flashes, to e ended on the scarred rampart of Sumter."