Round Anvil Rock

Nancy Huston Banks (1849-1934), the Kentucky journalist and critic who turned to fiction in middle age, followed Oldfield with Round Anvil Rock: A Romance, published by Macmillan in 1903. The novel is set in western Kentucky near the Ohio River around 1811, one of the strangest years in the region’s history, when the Great Comet hung in the sky and the New Madrid earthquakes shook the Mississippi valley. Against these real events Banks places the courtship of David and Ruth, young people of the frontier settlements, and builds her plot around an actual landmark, the Anvil Rock. Her preface states that the tale takes no great liberty with fact beyond drawing localities and incidents closer together, and the book still reads as part fiction, part folk history of frontier Kentucky. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.