George H. Devol

Born in Marietta, Ohio, in 1829, George H. Devol became known for his memoir Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi. Contemporary library and book records identify him as the author of that 1894 work, a vivid account of life on the river and in the gambling trade.

Devol’s book presents him as a longtime professional gambler whose experiences stretched across steamboats, boomtowns, and frontier communities. The memoir helped preserve a slice of 19th-century American life that readers still return to for its energy, risk, and colorful storytelling.

Sources found during research also describe him as later living in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he died in 1903. While many fine details of his life are repeated mainly in book catalogs and reprints, his reputation today rests above all on the enduring appeal of his adventurous Mississippi memoir.