thus mentioned, and though experiencing forty-six days under fire, received but one trifling wound. De Forest mustered out from the volunteer army in 1865 with the brevet rank of major. Postbellum After being mustered out of the army with the rest of the Veteran Reserve Corps of which he was the adjutant general, De Forest transferred to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (more commonly known as the "Freedmen's Bureau") and was appointed Assistant Commissioner in charge of the post in Greenville, South Carolina. His experiences there, published in magazines of the period and eventually in collected form as A Union Officer in the Reconstruction shed light on the conditions in the South during the Reconstruction. His magazine articles of his time in the army were also collected published posthumously as A Volunteer's Adventures. In 1867, De Forest published his most significant novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. William Dean Howells praised him as a "realist before realism was named," but most early critics argued that the Romantic elements of De Forest's plot mixed poorly with the admirable realism of the battle scenes, and the novel fell through with the audience in 1867. Reeditions in 1939 and 1956 reintroduced De Forest as an author, but the full range of his experimentalism in this early novel has still not been fully understood. In Miss Ravenel's Conversion, De Forest tried to come to grips with writing experiences De Forest himself had, and which did not fit any of the idealist and romantic patterns that war literature had followed so far. Consequently, there are a number of scenes that portray war with a graphic sense of bloody reality (f. i. the siege of Port Hudson), but there are also burlesque and comical passages, as well as reflective moments. In 1868, De Forest called for a new type of literature in an essay for The Nation and coined the term "The Great American Novel", which became his most influential contribution to American writing. He demanded an accurate "tableaux" of the country and noted that the closest to meeting the goal was Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. As he described the novel, "It was a picture of American life, drawn with a few strong and passionate strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still a portrait." He died of heart disease in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 17, 1906. Writing