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 <i>The Algerine Captive</i> 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, <i>The Algerine Captive</i> “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.