Monthly. George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, remembered Ludlow as “a slight, bright-eyed, alert young man, who seemed scarcely more than a boy,” when he came in for a visit. Curtis introduced Ludlow to the princes of the Harper publishing family as an upcoming literary talent who, before his twenty-fifth birthday, would have his first book go through several printings and would place more than ten stories in Harper's publications, some of which were printed serially and spanned several issues. Rosalie Ludlow's fictional stories often mirror with fair accuracy the events of his life. One can suppose that the childlike eighteen-year-old with brown hair and eyes and “a complexion, marble struck through with rose flush” who falls for the narrator of Our Queer Papa, a young magazine sub-editor described as a “good-looking gentleman with brains, who had published,” is the fictionalized Rosalie Osborne, who follows that description, and whom he would marry the year after the story's publication. Rosalie was eighteen when she married, not particularly young by the standards of the day, but young enough in character that it would later be remembered that “she was… but a little girl when she was married.” Memoirs written by members of the New York literary circle in which the Ludlows were an active part universally paint Rosalie as both very beautiful and very flirtatious. The wife of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, for instance, remembered Mrs. Ludlow as “the Dulcinea who had entangled [Aldrich] in the meshes of her brown hair.” The couple spent the first half of 1859 in Florida, where Ludlow wrote a series of articles, “Due South Sketches,” describing what he later recalled as “the climate of Utopia, the scenery of Paradise, and the social system of Hell.” He noted that while apologists for slavery condemned abolitionists for condoning miscegenation, “[t]he most open relations of concubinage existed between white chevaliers and black servants in the town of Jacksonville. I was not surprised at the fact, but was surprised at its openness… not even the pious shrugged their shoulders or seemed to care.” From Florida, the couple moved to New York City, staying in a boarding house and diving rapidly back into the literary social life. The Heart of the Continent In 1863 Albert Bierstadt was at the peak of a career that would make him America’s top landscape artist. Ludlow considered Bierstadt’s landscapes representative of the