Gary Mawyer

The Southern Skylark Gary Mawyer

When Augustus Hingely, English gentleman dilettante, came ashore in America he expected to be introduced to polite society in drawing rooms and lecture halls where he might express his thoughts on 'The Lives of the Poets'-Byron, Shelley and Keats. The Americans, however, quickly find different uses for Mr. Hingely. Inveigled onto the commercial circuit and sold South into the slaveholding regions of the new American Republic, Hingely is invested with one identity after another at the whim of those he meets: banker, lord, poet, pard, military hero; and yet somehow always an apostle of liberty, at least in the romantic sense.