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Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance. By Harlan Greene. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. xviii, 372 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8203-2211-3.)
John Bennett (1865-1956) was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, and as a young man in the Midwest worked chiefly as a journalist and writer of adventure tales for youths. In his thirties, he enrolled in the Art Students' League in New York, and while there he published a perennially popular children's tale, Master Skylark (1897), set in Shakespearean England. Soon thereafter he married into the South Carolina gentry-his wife was a granddaughter of the antebellum writer Louisa McCord-and became active in the cultural life of Charleston. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was the...