Copperhead, which Ron Maxwell directed from my adaptation of Harold Frederic’s novella, opens in theaters June 28, with a second wave of openings July 19. You can find where it’s playing at copperheadthemovie.com. Herewith my introduction to the newly published edition containing Frederic’s story and my screenplay; it’s available at dzancbooks.org/copperhead.
Harold Frederic, born in 1856, was a native of Utica, which though it is the eighth largest city in New York can fairly stake a claim to being, pound for pound, the literary capital of the state. Frederic lived a short but full – perhaps overly full – life. In brief, he began his career as a Utica and later Albany newspaper editor, in which capacity he was celebrated as a wit and bon vivant. He was a good friend of fellow Upstater and U.S. President Grover Cleveland, whose Jeffersonian Democratic political convictions Frederic shared. He left his native grounds – for good – in 1884 to become a New York Times foreign correspondent based in London. Between 1886 and his death in 1898, Harold Frederic published more than a dozen books, most famously The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), a tale of a simple Upstate Methodist minister’s loss of faith which is widely considered a masterpiece of late-19th century American realism. (F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Damnation of Theron Ware "the best American novel" written before 1920.) Frederic was also a bigamist whose wife and mistress (and their children) lived about fifteen miles apart in the precincts of London. He spent weekdays with one family and weekends with the other. He suffered a stroke in 1898 and had the bad luck to be under the care of his Christian Scientist mistress, who refused medical treatment for the stricken author. Frederic died, and she was tried, unsuccessfully, for manslaughter.
The Copperhead – its title taken from the derisive serpentine epithet applied to Northern critics of the Civil War – was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine in 1893 and published in book form that same year. It was brought out in England the next year as The Copperhead and Other Stories of the North in the American War. The novel, or novella, or longish short story, as you prefer, would reappear in several collections of Frederic’s fiction, most notably in The Civil War Stories of Harold Frederic, under the imprint of Syracuse University Press and with an introduction by Edmund Wilson.
In every incarnation it sold poorly, as Frederic’s work usually did. But then The Copperhead hit none of the expected notes. It catered neither to "Battle Hymn of the Republic" Northern righteousness nor "Dixie" Southern romanticism.