In 1859, after a dozen years in the diplomatic service, Richard Acton returns home to Avalon, his family's Lowcountry home. He rides through a mist of "fateful foreboding" hanging over the shadow-darkened pine woods and moss-draped live oaks. World weary from his travels that included time in Czarist Russia and in Paris, Acton is shocked to find the quiet beauty of the Lowcountry shattered by wild talk of secession.
Thus the stage is set by Barbara L. Bellows in her introduction to this re-edition of Herbert Ravenel Sass's Look Back to Glory, a classic Southern novel of antebellum memories and Civil War and Reconstruction realities originally published in 1933. Written during the period of southern literary renaissance, Look Back to Glory takes a unique look at the Civil War and its consequences for the economy of the South. When many of his contemporaries were perpetuating a view of the South as morally and intellectually inferior, Sass posited that the antebellum South held an agricultural and economic wisdom that the country could learn from as it struggled through bankruptcy and depression in the 1930s.