The Hornet's Nest

Full of adrenaline and anticipation, Jimmy Carter’s painting captures the foreboding and tense moment before an imminent clash between frontiersmen of the American South and the advancing British troops. A version of this composition appeared on the cover of Carter’s The Hornet’s Nest (2003), the novel that made him the first U.S. president to publish a work of fiction, and still the only former president to have written a novel entirely on his own. Blending meticulously researched historical detail with fictional characters and threads drawn from his own family history, Carter illuminated Southern narratives of the Revolutionary War that had long remained overlooked and untold.

As Carter explains, “The Hornet’s Nest is an area of impassable creeks, swamps, and hills in Northeast Georgia that was used as a refuge by the small group of revolutionaries even during the times when British troops occupied all other parts of the Deep South” (Ellen Fried, “The Revolution in the South: President Carter’s New Novel Brings History to Life,” Prologue Magazine (Summer 2004), vol. 36, no. 2, n.p.). In the present picture, Carter depicts those revolutionaries navigating familiar terrain, using its dense cover to evade and outmaneuver the approaching redcoats. When asked why he chose to write a novel on the Revolutionary War, Carter answered that he hoped readers, through understanding the history of this conflict, will come to recognize that “In almost every case, there is an alternative to war” (Fried, 2004, n.p.).