The Eagle's Shadow (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By James Branch Cabell

This 1904 novel, set in the strange and distant days when Colonel Roosevelt first became president, tells of a disputed inheritance that shapes and misshapes the lives of two young people:  Billy Williams, a painter, and Margaret Hugonin, who does not desire wealth but has it thrust upon her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411444324

James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell’s worked appeared in both Harper’s Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.

Reviews for The Eagle's Shadow (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[wirkman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This edition of Cabell's first novel is probably the one most commonly found in bookstores, the so-called "Kalki" edition. These Kalki editions were published by McBride in the 1920s, and featured brown covers with an insignia on the front of a horse . . . Kalki, you may remember, is the eschatalogical Hindu figure who returns to Earth riding on a silver stallion, ushering in the end of the world. The Kalki editions were not, oddly, the last; that was the Storisende editions, and there "The Eagle's Shadow" gets a later number in the oeuvre, a later number to signify its place in time in the elaborate (and slightly cracked) assemblage called by the author "The Biography of the Life of Manuel."Read this edition, and you will get an introduction by an author I had not heard of in other contexts, but on quick research appears to have existed in actual fact -- in our reality, not merely Cabell's. Funny thing is, though, he writes a bit like Cabell.As I am now, perhaps, under the influence of the master himself. Indeed, this is the problem of so much writing on Cabell; the writing could be by Cabell himself. In the appendix to this volume (entitled "About Morals") is reprinted a number of letters about the alleged immorality of this book. I can't be certain, but I get the idea that Cabell himself wrote a number of them.Oh, probably not. But it wouldn't be the only time in Cabell's career that scandalizing the masses of moralistic Americans was the way the publishers pushed his books out the Shipping Department.