author
b. 1873
A Midwestern novelist, lecturer, and journalist, he wrote fiction with unusual plots and a wide range of settings, from small-town America to South America. His career also stretched into teaching, publishing, engineering, and even film work, giving his books an unusually varied background.
by Charles Francis Stocking
Born in Freeport, Illinois, on September 13, 1873, Charles Francis Stocking was an American author whose work appeared across the early twentieth century. Library and bibliography records list novels including The Diary of Jean Evarts, Carmen Ariza, The Mayor of Filbert, Thou Israel, and The Identity of Douglas Bain.
A contemporary biographical sketch says his early experience in both small-town and metropolitan newspapers helped shape his writing. The same source describes an unusually wide-ranging career: he worked as a correspondent, teacher, university secretary, lecturer, publisher, and mining and metallurgical engineer, and was reportedly sent twice into the jungles of Colombia in search of lost Spanish gold mines.
That mix of practical experience and literary ambition seems to have fed the dramatic, wide-traveling quality of his fiction. The record available here is scattered rather than fully detailed, but it clearly shows a prolific writer whose books circulated widely enough to remain preserved in major digital libraries and public-domain collections.