Edward L. (Edward Lytton) Wheeler

Born in 1854 or 1855, Edward Lytton Wheeler was an American writer of nineteenth-century dime novels. He wrote during the boom years of cheap, serialized popular fiction, when action-packed stories reached a wide audience through weekly and pocket-format publications.

His best-known creation was Deadwood Dick, a swaggering frontier character who appeared in a long-running series beginning in the 1870s. Wheeler's western tales blended invented plots with recognizable names from the period, including figures such as Calamity Jane and Sitting Bull, helping shape the mythic, larger-than-life version of the Old West that later became a staple of popular culture.

Wheeler died in 1885, still a young man, but his stories continued to circulate after his death. Even now, he stands as an important early popular storyteller whose work shows how deeply dime novels influenced American adventure fiction.