He published Rachel Dyer (1828), Authorship (1830), and The Down-Easters (1833) while living in Portland, Maine, but all are reworkings of content he wrote in London. Keep Cool, Neal's first novel, made him "the first in America to be natural in his diction" and the "father of American subversive fiction". Generally regarded as a failure, the book shows that "the gulf between Neal's prophetic vision of a native literature and his own capacity to fulfill that vision is painfully apparent". The productivity of Neal's Baltimore days is "hard to believe — until one reads the novels" and notices the haste with which they were written. Logan, a Family History is a "gothic tapestry" of "superstition, supernatural suggestions, brutality, sensuality, colossal hatred, delirium, rape, insanity, murder... incest and cannibalism". By "elevating emotional effect over coherence, the novel excites its readers to death." It challenged the national narrative of American Indians' foreordained disappearance in the face of White Americans' territorial expansion and collapsed racial boundaries between the two groups. Seventy-Six was Neal's favorite of his novels. When it was released in 1823, Neal was at the height of his prominence as a novelist, being at the time the chief rival of leading American author, James Fenimore Cooper. Inspired by Cooper's The Spy, Neal based his story on historical research compiled a few years earlier while helping his friend Paul Allen write his History of the American Revolution. Seventy-Six was criticized at the time for its use of profanity and was recognized later as the first work of American fiction to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch. Brother Jonathan: or, the New Englanders was the most "complex, ambitious, and demanding" American novel until Cooper's Littlepage Manuscripts trilogy twenty years later. As "one of the most emphatic, even shrill examples of U.S. nationalistic literature", it is "positively bristling with regional accents, from the New England twang of its protagonists through to bursts of patois in Virginian, Georgian, Scottish, Penobscot Indian, and Ebonics". Running counter to Neal's purported nationalist theme, "the diverse linguistic styles" used in the novel "subvert the fiction of a unified, national whole" in the US. The novel's "greatest achievement [is] its faithful if irreverent representation of American customs and American speech" that nevertheless "was read by American reviewers as outright slander" against the US and "aroused a terrible storm... in Portland [where] he was denounced with great indignation." Rachel Dyer: a North American