A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

Born in Wandsworth in 1872, Alec John Dawson wrote under the name A. J. Dawson and also used several pseudonyms. Reliable reference sources identify him as an English author, traveler, and journalist, and record a long publishing career that produced more than thirty books.

He is now most often associated with Finn the Wolfhound, an animal adventure novel that helped keep his name in circulation long after many of his contemporaries faded from view. His fiction often drew on travel, action, and close observation of the natural world, which gives many of his books an energetic, immediately visual feel.

During the First World War, Dawson served in military propaganda work, reached the rank of Major, and was awarded both the MBE and the Croix de Guerre. Sources differ on whether his death should be given as 1951 or 1952, so it is safest to say that he died in the early 1950s.