Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War SouthKathryn B. McKee's Reading Reconstruction situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849 1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works. McKee reveals conflicts in Bonner's writing as her newfound feminism clashes with her resurgent racism, two forces widely prevalent and persistently oppositional throughout