Witching Times

De Forest's first novel, revolving around the Salem witch trials of 1691–92, was called by Edmund Wilson "among the most interesting of his fictions." Chadwick Hansen, more sensitive to the novel's flaws than was the author of Patriotic Gore, nonetheless calls Witching Times "an early and significant document in the history of American realism."

"Attention to the physical substance of experience and the force and humor of vernacular speech," according to Professor Hansen, are the prime virtues of the novel De Forest serialized in Putnam's Magazine in 1856–57. Writing less than a decade after publication of The Scarlet Letter, De Forest penetrated what Hawthorne called the "opaque substance" of the experienced world. Almost a generation before the heyday of Mark Twain, De Forest made a good start toward capturing authentic American dialect.

For this edition the typographical corruptions and auctorial irregularities of serialized version have been corrected, resulting in a most readable volume of American social and literary history