author
Ellsworth Douglass
1863–1933
Best remembered for the curious 1899 novel Pharaoh’s Broker, this American writer published under a pen name and drew on a life that seems to have been as restless and unusual as his fiction.
1 Audiobook
Pharaoh's Broker Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner
by Ellsworth Douglass
About the author
Ellsworth Douglass was the pen name of Elmer Dwiggins (1863–1933), an American businessman and author. Reference sources on late-Victorian fiction and science fiction identify him as the author of Pharaoh’s Broker: Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner (1899), a speculative novel that helped place him on the margins of early science-fiction history.
Accounts of his life describe him not mainly as a full-time literary figure, but as a real-estate speculator and insurance broker whose work took him to different countries around the turn of the twentieth century. That unusual background seems to fit the far-ranging, imaginative quality of his best-known book.
Although not widely famous today, Douglass remains of interest to readers exploring early fantasy and proto-science-fiction. His work survives through library and public-domain listings, and the blend of adventure, satire, and otherworldly invention in Pharaoh’s Broker still gives modern readers a glimpse of science fiction before the genre had fully taken shape.