Harold Steele MacKaye

Born in Paris in 1866 and raised in the United States, Harold Steele MacKaye was the son of playwright and theater innovator Steele MacKaye and the brother of writer Percy MacKaye. He studied at Columbia and later earned law degrees from Georgetown before building a career in patent law.

Alongside that legal work, he wrote fiction. His best-known book is The Panchronicon (1904), a comic early time-travel novel that has kept his name alive among readers of classic speculative fiction. Project Gutenberg and other library catalogs also list The Winged Helmet among his works.

MacKaye died in 1928. Though he is not a widely known figure today, he remains an interesting example of an early twentieth-century writer whose imaginative fiction grew out of a family deeply connected to American theater, literature, and invention.