author
Emily Grant Hutchings
Best remembered for the strange literary adventure of Jap Herron, she was a Missouri journalist and author whose name became tied to one of the most unusual Mark Twain controversies of the early 20th century. Her career mixed serious newspaper and magazine work with a lasting fascination for spiritualism and literary fame.
1 Audiobook
Indian Summer
by Emily Grant Hutchings
About the author
Born in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1870, Emily Grant Hutchings built a reputation as a writer and journalist in St. Louis. Contemporary biographical material describes her as an active contributor to newspapers and magazines, and public-domain library records show that she published more than one book in her own name.
She is most widely remembered today for Jap Herron (1917), a novel she said had been dictated by the spirit of Mark Twain through a Ouija board, with help from medium Lola Hays. The claim drew national attention and helped make the book a literary curiosity that still gets discussed whenever Twain oddities and spiritualist publishing are mentioned.
That unusual episode has largely overshadowed the rest of her writing life, but it also explains why she remains memorable more than a century later. Hutchings died in St. Louis in 1960, leaving behind a career that sits at an unusual crossroads of journalism, popular fiction, and the era's fascination with communication beyond the grave.