author
Edwin Davies Schoonmaker
1873–1940
A writer, lecturer, and public affairs commentator, he moved easily between drama, poetry, and political writing. His work often aimed big, using history and current events to ask what nations and ordinary people owed one another.
2 Audiobooks
The Americans
by Edwin Davies Schoonmaker
The Saxons: A Drama of Christianity in the North
by Edwin Davies Schoonmaker
About the author
Born in 1873, Edwin Davies Schoonmaker was an American author whose career stretched across literature, teaching, and public commentary. Sources connected him with Transylvania University, where he taught ancient languages in the late 1890s, and later described him as a lecturer, publicist, and traveler as well as a writer.
His books show a strong interest in history, society, and national identity. Project Gutenberg lists The Saxons: A Drama of Christianity in the North and The Americans, and library records and other archival sources also connect him with works such as The World Storm and Beyond and writing on Russia and world affairs. That range suggests a writer who was just as interested in public ideas as in storytelling.
Schoonmaker was also reported to have served with the United States Mission to Russia in 1918–1919, an experience that fits with his later writing about international politics. He died in 1940. Reliable biographical information about him is fairly limited online, but the available records consistently present him as a serious early-20th-century man of letters with interests that reached well beyond the literary world.