author
Ebenezer Wheelwright
1800–1877
Best known for The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692, this 19th-century American writer brought Salem’s witch-trial era to life years before Hawthorne made similar themes famous. He spent most of his working life in trade rather than literature, which makes his surviving novel feel like a fascinating literary outlier.
1 Audiobook
The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692
by Ebenezer Wheelwright
About the author
Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1800, Ebenezer Wheelwright was an American merchant, bookseller, and author. Sources on his life are sparse, but they consistently connect him with Newburyport and identify him as someone who balanced business with literary interests.
Wheelwright is remembered chiefly for The Salem Belle: A Tale of 1692, a historical novel published in 1842. Modern editions and scholarly descriptions have helped renew interest in the book, especially because critics have noted its place in the cultural background of later American writing about Puritan New England and the Salem witch trials.
He spent much of his professional life as a West Indies merchant in Boston and died in 1877. Though not widely known today, his work offers a glimpse of early American historical fiction and of a writer whose single best-known book has earned a second life long after his own time.