author
d. 1905
A self-taught lawyer from Indiana, he built a second life as a magazine writer, turning late-night work into dozens of short stories. His fiction often leans toward frontier settings, moral tests, and a plainspoken sense of drama.
Born in 1860 and dying in 1905, Frank N. Stratton — also listed as Frank Nelson Stratton — was an American short-story writer whose work survives today largely through archival and public-domain collections. Project Gutenberg identifies him under both forms of his name and preserves several of his stories.
A family history of Stratton describes him as a self-taught attorney and state prosecutor from Kokomo, Indiana, who wrote fiction after his regular work hours. That same source says he published nationally and left behind roughly fifty stories, suggesting a writing career that ran alongside a demanding professional life.
His surviving fiction points to an interest in action, conscience, and the American West. Readers coming to him now will likely find a lesser-known author from the turn of the twentieth century whose stories reflect the pace and storytelling style of magazine fiction from that era.