Lincoln’s Westerner: The Short Fiction of Noah Brooks
Although now best known as a journalist and confidant of Abraham Lincoln, Noah Brooks played a number of important roles in the nineteenth-century literary scene. With writer Bret Harte he was a cofounder of the Overland Monthly literary magazine, he was the first editor and publisher of bestselling philosopher-economist Henry George, and he was one of Mark Twain’s earliest editors.
He was also a prominent editor at several newspapers, a bestselling author of children’s books, a Washington correspondent during the Civil War, and a close friend of Abraham and Mary Lincoln.
Brooks was also a writer of what he called “distinctively Californian” short stories. These stories, a long-lost mine for readers of Gold Rush fiction, have never before been collected into a single volume. Lincoln’s Westerner includes nineteen short stories and five western sketches, all first published between 1860 and 1904, supplemented by a critical introduction exploring Brooks’s life, fiction, and ties to the American west.
KDP, 2020
“Noah Brooks was…a man of sterling character and equipped with a right heart, also a good historian where facts were not essential.” —Mark Twain