author
Harry Hazelton
A shadowy name from the heyday of the American dime novel, linked to fast-moving frontier and Civil War adventures that helped shape popular mass-market fiction. Even the uncertainty around the name adds to the appeal: the books survive clearly, while the person behind them remains harder to pin down.
2 Audiobooks
The Prisoner of the Mill; or, Captain Hayward's "Body Guard"
by Harry Hazelton
About the author
Harry Hazelton is associated with 19th-century American dime novels, especially action-heavy stories set against the Civil War and the frontier. Surviving bibliographic records connect the name with works including The Border Spy; or, The Beautiful Captive of the Rebel Camp (1863), The Prisoner of the Mill; or, Captain Hayward's "Body Guard" (1864), and California Joe (1876).
What makes Hazelton especially interesting is that the identity behind the name is not fully settled. A major dime-novel reference from Northern Illinois University says that who "Harry Hazelton" or "Hazeltine" actually was is unknown, and it notes that the names Harry Hazelton and Lieut.-Col. Hazeltine were used interchangeably in period publications. LibriVox, drawing on later public-domain cataloging, instead identifies Harry Hazelton with the American author Joseph Edward Badger, Jr. and says the connection became known after an 1893 misattribution. Because reliable sources do not agree cleanly, it is safest to treat Harry Hazelton as a likely pen name or publishing identity tied to early popular adventure fiction.
Whatever the exact biography, the work itself has lasted. Hazelton's stories belong to the fast, dramatic tradition of cheap serialized entertainment that brought battles, spies, outlaws, rescues, and frontier danger to a huge readership. For modern listeners, that gives the name a special place in the history of American popular storytelling.