was there, but he never achieved that goal. Our Ephraim was commissioned in 1834 by actor James Henry Hackett, who asked Neal to "squat right down & in your ready style in two or three days conjure me together something 'curious nice. Hackett rejected the play upon receipt as unsuitable for production: too many roles requiring a rural Maine accent, unrealistic set requirements, and too much scheduled improvisation. The play nevertheless represents "a significant advance in early American theatrical realism" and is the "fullest detailing of Yankee dialect" of any work Neal produced. Neal's most noteworthy work of theatrical criticism is his five-installment essay "The Drama" (1829). Condemning stilted dialogue, Neal contended that "when a person talks beautifully in his sorrow, it shows both great preparation and insincerity" and urged that playwrights should, "avoid poetry whenever the characters are much in earnest." Sixty years later William Dean Howells was considered innovative for saying the same thing. Editing Neal found his first two positions as editor through fellow members of the Delphian Club in Baltimore. His longest stint as editor was for The Yankee, which he founded only a few months after returning from London in 1827. Maine's first literary periodical, it ran weekly until, for financial reasons, it merged with a Boston magazine and was renamed The Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette as a monthly publication. It merged with Ladies' Magazine when it ceased publication at the end of 1829. When starting his last stint as editor, he declared, "Having ten or fifteen minutes to spare, we have made up our minds to edit a newspaper." After Neal left in a huff few weeks later, the next editor announced, "John Neal has retired from the editorship of the Transcript, the fifteen minutes having expired." Despite professing allegiance to Benthamian Utilitarianism in The Yankee, Neal dedicated much more space in its pages to reinforcing Northern New England's standing on the national stage and championing American regionalism. His regionalism was distinct from those later in the century "who tended to portray regional spaces in nostalgic or sentimental terms as 'enclaves of tradition' that were posed against an increasingly urban and industrial nation." Instead, "Neal remained committed to imagining regions as dynamic, future-oriented spaces whose identities would—and should—remain elusive." Controversial at the time for its lack of association with any political party or other interest group, The Yankee was free to cover "every