Gordon Keith (novel)

Gordon Keith is a 1903 novel by the American writer and diplomat Thomas Nelson Page.

Gordon Keith is the son of a formerly wealthy Southern family that lost its plantation, "Elphinstone", in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The novel follows him as he builds a career in Appalachia and New York in an attempt to earn enough to recover his family's estate. He is eventually successful and returns home to the South.^[1]

In The Chicago Tribune, Jeanette L. Gilder wrote that the book was an enjoyable read and that it had a particularly compelling romantic sub-plot.^[2] A review of the book in The Atlanta Journal praised the book's "wisdom, wit, and philosophy" and its value as a historical record of how the Civil War affected wealthy Southern families. However, the reviewer also criticised the book's length and described its plot as overly complex.^[3] The book was similarly described as "unusually long" and "rather overcrowded with characters" in The Academy and Literature.^[4] An earlier review of the book in the same publication called the novel "very wearisome" and too crowded with various plot events to function as an effective character study.^[5] In The Spectator, a reviewer wrote that the book had an effective beginning, but that it failed to maintain the reader's interest beyond the first 200 pages.^[6]

• King, Kimball (1965). "Satirical Portraits By Thomas Nelson Page". The Mississippi Quarterly. 18 (2): 74–81. ISSN 0026-637X.