Cooke, John

Cooke, John (Esten)

(1830–86) writer; born in Winchester, Va. He earned a national reputation with historical romances set in old Virginia, such as The Virginia Comedians (1854). His Civil War service with the Confederate army inspired him to write war novels and biographies of “Stonewall” Jackson (1863) and R. E. Lee (1871). Returning to Virginia after the war, he wrote idealized novels of the antebellum South and a distinguished colonial state history (1883).