author
Francis Grierson
1848–1927
A prairie-born memoirist, pianist, and mystic, he turned an unusual life into vivid books about the American Midwest and the cultural world of Europe. Best known today for The Valley of Shadows, he wrote with the sharp eye of someone who had lived many lives at once.
2 Audiobooks
Psycho-Phone Messages
by Francis Grierson
Abraham Lincoln: The Practical Mystic
by Francis Grierson
About the author
Born in Birkenhead, England, in 1848 as Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard, he was taken as a baby to Illinois, where he grew up on the frontier. Later he became known as Francis Grierson, the pen name under which he published essays, memoirs, and reflections on art, politics, and spiritual life.
Before he was widely read as a writer, he had already made a name for himself in Europe as a pianist and performer. Accounts of his life describe him moving in fashionable circles and attracting attention not only for his music but also for his interest in mysticism and psychic phenomena, interests that stayed closely tied to his public image.
His most lasting book is The Valley of Shadows, a memoir of boyhood in Illinois that gives a lively picture of frontier life before the Civil War. He died in Los Angeles in 1927, leaving behind a body of work that mixes personal memory, cultural criticism, and the sense that everyday life can hold something strange and luminous.