Caruthers, William Alexander: - William Alexander Caruthers was an American novelist. William Alexander Caruthers was born in 1802 in Rockbridge County, Virginia. His uncle Archibald Alexander was the fourth President of Hampden-Sydney College. He attended Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) and later studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He relocated to Savannah, Georgia, in 1837 and died there in 1846. Caruthers' debut novel, The Kentuckian In New York, published in 1834, is notable for expressing doubt about slavery and suggesting that termination was unfeasible at the time. The novel has a subplot involving a narrowly escaped slave revolt, most likely influenced by Nat Turner's rebellion. Some credit a brief inclusion of an Arabic-language letter by a slave with influencing a similar subplot in Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). His subsequent and more well-known works include The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown, and The Knights of the Horse Shoe, a romanticized account of the historic Knights of the Golden Horseshoe Expedition, also known as the Transmontane Expedition.