For more than a century and a half, the biggest bestsellers, the favorite fictions of succeeding generations of American readers, have been historical romances. No other genre has even come close to the consistent popularity enjoyed by historical romances from The Spy in 1821 down to Gone with the Wind and Roots in recent times. Not to be provincial, we should have to push the date back to 1814 when the Waverley novels began to appear. For it was Sir Walter Scott who created both the genre as we know it and an immense international market for more books like Rob Roy and Ivanhoe: more books even than prolific successors like James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, or – sliding further down the aesthetic scale – Zane Grey and Frank Yerby could ever hope to supply. This was a market for “trash” but also for the work of serious popular writers like Victor Hugo and Willa Cather and, on momentous occasions, of highbrow artists like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Boris Pasternak. Writers of all levels of talent, all degrees of artistic and moral seriousness, could find models in the books that Scott and Cooper wrote at the outset of the tradition. For the earliest historical romances varied so widely in artistry and moral substance, in the times and places and peoples represented, that they sometimes appear to have anticipated all later developments of the genre.