Frona Eunice Wait

author

Frona Eunice Wait

1859–1946

A pioneering California journalist, she moved from newspaper work into fiction and nonfiction that captured the culture, landscapes, and ambitions of the American West. She is best remembered today for "Yermah the Dorado," an unusual early speculative novel set in a lost ancient civilization on the site of future San Francisco.

2 Audiobooks

Yermah the Dorado: The story of a lost race

Yermah the Dorado: The story of a lost race

by Frona Eunice Wait

The Stories of El Dorado

The Stories of El Dorado

by Frona Eunice Wait

About the author

Born in 1859, Frona Eunice Wait was an American writer and journalist who built her career in California at a time when journalism was still overwhelmingly male. She worked for San Francisco newspapers and went on to become an associate editor of the Overland Monthly, giving her a strong place in the literary life of the West.

Her writing ranged widely. Along with journalism, she published nonfiction on California life and industry and wrote fiction, including Yermah the Dorado (1897), later reissued as Yermah the Dorado: The Story of a Lost Race. That novel blends romance, mysticism, and speculative ideas in a vision of ancient San Francisco, and it has helped keep her name alive with readers interested in early science fiction and utopian writing.

Wait died in 1946. Though she is not as widely known now as some of her contemporaries, her work offers a vivid glimpse of California literary culture and of a woman writer making an ambitious career for herself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.