The Robber Bridegroom — Eudora Welty

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes a classic fairy tale and turns it into a novel set along the eighteenth-century frontier of the Natchez Trace.
 
In the clammy forests of Louisiana, somewhere between New Orleans and the muddy Mississippi River, the berry-stained bandit of the woods, Jamie Lockhart, saves the life of a gullible planter. In reward, Jamie is given shelter -- only to kidnap the planter's lovely young daughter, Rosamund. It's an impulsive act that will have far-reaching consequences, and will set in motion a series of fantastic, murderous, and flamboyantly uncivilized romantic adventures.
 
With legendary figures of Mississippi's past -- including notorious riverboatman Mike Fink and the thrill-killing Harp brothers -- mingling side-by-side with characters from legendary fairy tales and the author's own imagination, The Robber Bridegroom in an exuberant cocktail of fantasy, folklore and history along the treacherous Natchez Trace.  
The basis of the popular musical that has run both on and off Broadway, The Robber Bridegroom is “a modern fairy tale, where irony and humor, outright nonsense, deep wisdom and surrealistic extravaganzas becomes a poetic unity through the power of a pure exquisite style” (The New York Times).
 
“As sly and irresistible as anything in Candide. For all her wild, rich fancy, Welty writes prose that is as disciplined as it is beautiful.” -- The New Yorker