author
T. C. (Thomas Cooper) De Leon
1839–1914
A lively Southern journalist, playwright, and memoirist, he turned the upheavals of the Civil War and its aftermath into popular books and newspaper writing. His career stretched from reporting and editing to fiction and theater, helping make him a recognizable literary figure in the late 19th-century South.
1 Audiobook
Four Years in Rebel Capitals An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death
by T. C. (Thomas Cooper) De Leon
About the author
Born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1839, De Leon became an American journalist, author, and playwright whose work was closely tied to the South before and after the Civil War. Sources describe him as a prominent literary figure of his region, and one reference calls him Alabama's first professional man of letters.
After early work in Washington, he served with the Confederate cause during the war. In the decades that followed, he edited and wrote for newspapers and magazines, especially in Mobile and New York, and published a wide range of work including fiction, drama, humor, and memoir. Among the books most often associated with him is Four Years in Rebel Capitals, a remembered firsthand account of Confederate life.
He died in 1914. Today, he is mainly remembered for his journalism, his regional literary career, and his vivid writing about the Civil War era and the postwar South.