author

Frank Cowan

1844–1905

A restless 19th-century American man of letters, he moved through medicine, law, journalism, politics, and travel before turning those experiences into fiction and memoir. His work ranges from romance and satire to firsthand recollections of President Andrew Johnson.

1 Audiobook

Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions. A Complete Collection of the Legends, Superstitions, Beliefs, and Ominous Signs Connected with Insects; Together with Their Uses in Medicine, Art, and as Food; and a Summary of Their Remarkable Injuries and Appearances.

Curious Facts in the History of Insects; Including Spiders and Scorpions. A Complete Collection of the Legends, Superstitions, Beliefs, and Ominous Signs Connected with Insects; Together with Their Uses in Medicine, Art, and as Food; and a Summary of Their Remarkable Injuries and Appearances.

by Frank Cowan

About the author

Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Frank Cowan was an American writer whose life was as varied as his books. Contemporary reference sources describe him not only as an author, but also as a lawyer, physician, journalist, and at one point a secretary to President Andrew Johnson.

That unusually wide background shows up in the kinds of books he wrote. Cowan published fiction, poetry, and travel-inflected work, and he is still noted in genre reference sources for Revi-Lona: A Romance of Love in a Marvelous Land, a late-19th-century imaginative novel often discussed in connection with early speculative fiction and lost-world satire.

He died in 1905, but his career still stands out for its range: a public life that touched politics and the professions, and a writing life broad enough to include memoir, romance, and literary experiment. For listeners who enjoy overlooked authors with eventful biographies, he offers a particularly curious and distinctive case.