author
Ebenezer Wheelwright
1800–1877
Best known for The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692, he turned New England history into a dramatic novel years before Salem became one of American literature’s most famous settings. His life moved between bookselling, trade, and writing, giving his fiction a distinctly lived-in 19th-century feel.
1 Audiobook
The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692
by Ebenezer Wheelwright
About the author
Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1800, Ebenezer Wheelwright worked in several trades over the course of his life. Sources connected with modern editions of his work describe him as an early bookseller in Newburyport, later a flour merchant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and for much of his career a West Indies merchant in Boston.
He is remembered today as the author of The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692, a historical novel first published in 1842. The book revisits the Salem witch trials through a story of suspicion, revenge, and romance, and later scholars have pointed to it as an important, long-overlooked work in the background of American historical fiction.
Wheelwright died in 1877. Although he is not widely known now, the survival and republication of The Salem Belle have kept his name alive for readers interested in early American novels and the literary afterlife of Salem.