The bestselling turn-of-the-century classic. A novel that “makes one realize as never before the agonizing effects of the Civil War in a border state” (The New York Times).
First serialized in Scribner’s Magazine in 1903, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come is the rags-to-respectability saga of Chad Buford, an orphan of questionable parentage from the Cumberland Mountains. He is befriended first by the kind and generous Turner family in the valley of Kingdom Come Creek in Southeastern Kentucky and then by the aristocratic Major Calvin Buford in the “settlemints” of the Bluegrass. Convinced that Chad is a kinsman, the major discovers the poor boy’s blueblood pedigree and persuades him to pursue a proper education in Lexington. Before, however, he can settle down with an appropriate wife and begin to live the life of “Chadwick Buford, Gentleman,” the Civil War intervenes to separate him from his newfound status, family, and friends. In The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, “the war and its conflicts set an epic stage for the novel’s main business, the testing and maturation of a hero” (Kentucky Living).