author
Virginia Carter Castleman
1864–1937
A Virginia poet and novelist whose work often turned to history, faith, and the landscape of the American South. Best known for Pocahontas: A Poem, she also trained as a librarian before returning to her home state.
1 Audiobook
Pocahontas: A Poem
by Virginia Carter Castleman
About the author
Virginia Carter Castleman was an American writer born in Herndon, Virginia, in 1864. Sources on her life are scattered, but archival records connect her with Edgeworth Institute in Baltimore and with library training at Drexel, after which she worked in cataloging at the University of Pennsylvania.
She wrote both poetry and fiction. Her best-known work today is Pocahontas: A Poem (1907), published around the tercentenary of Jamestown, and library catalogs also preserve novels including Roger of Fairfield and A Child of the Covenant. Her writing is closely associated with Virginia history and with the literary tastes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Castleman died in 1937. Although she is not widely known now, digitized editions and archival collections have helped keep her work available to modern readers.