author
Herman Gastrell Seely
Best known for the early 20th-century novel A Son of the City, this American writer also published work in The Atlantic. His surviving record suggests a small but varied career that reached from fiction into editorial and nonfiction writing.
1 Audiobook
A son of the city : A story of boy life
by Herman Gastrell Seely
About the author
Born in Chicago in 1891, Herman Gastrell Seely was an American writer whose best-known book is A Son of the City, published in 1917 by A. C. McClurg. The Library of Congress catalog records the novel as a story of boy life, and Project Gutenberg lists it among the works available under his name.
Seely also wrote for The Atlantic, which preserves an author page for him, showing that his work appeared in one of the major American magazines of the period. Other bibliographic records connect his name with Sagebrush Dentist, a later book based on the recollections of Dr. Will Frackelton.
Reliable biographical information on Seely is fairly limited, but available records place his life from 1891 to 1958. What remains clear is that he belonged to a generation of early 20th-century American authors whose work moved between magazine publishing and books, leaving behind fiction with a strong sense of place and period.