A predecessor of both the nativist humor of Mark Twain and the exotic
adventure stories of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Richard
Dana, Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive is an entertaining romp
through eighteenth-century society, a satiric look at a variety of
American types, from the backwoods schoolmaster to the southern
gentleman, and a serious exposé of the horrors of the slave trade. "In
stylistic purity and the clarity with which Tyler investigates and
dramatizes American manners," the critic Jack B. Moore has noted, The
Algerine Captive "stands alone in our earliest fiction." It is also one
of the first attempts by an American novelist to depict the Islamic
world, and lays bare a culture clash and diplomatic quagmire not unlike
the one that obtains between the United States and Muslim nations today.