author
Charles Romyn Dake
1849–1899
Best known for a late-19th-century adventure novel that picks up where Edgar Allan Poe left off, this American writer also built a career in medicine and editorial work. His small body of fiction still draws interest from readers curious about strange voyages, polar mysteries, and literary sequels.
1 Audiobook
A Strange Discovery
by Charles Romyn Dake
About the author
Born in Pittsburgh in 1849, he became a homeopathic physician after graduating from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and he later practiced in Belleville, Illinois. He also worked as an editor in the homeopathic press, giving him a career that mixed medicine, publishing, and literary ambition.
His best-known book is A Strange Discovery (1899), a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Though his fiction output appears to have been small, that novel gave him a lasting niche in American speculative and adventure literature.
He died in 1899, the same year his novel was published. His life was brief, but his work remains of interest for the unusual way it connects 19th-century medical culture, magazine editing, and imaginative fiction.