author
James Edgar Smith
b. 1864
A little-known American writer of poetry and drama, he published work that ranged from reflective verse to a stage adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His surviving books suggest a writer interested in both literary tradition and devotional themes.
1 Audiobook
The Scarlet Stigma: A Drama in Four Acts
by James Edgar Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne
About the author
Born in 1864, James Edgar Smith appears to have been an American author whose published work includes both poetry and drama. Library and book records connect him with The Scarlet Stigma: A Drama in Four Acts, a play based on Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, first published in 1899, and with Near Bethlehem, and Other Poems, published in 1922.
The range of those books gives a useful sense of his writing: one reaches back to a major American novel and reshapes it for the stage, while the other points to a quieter, more lyrical side centered on poetry and religious reflection. He does not seem to be widely documented in major biographical reference sources now online, so many personal details remain hard to confirm.
Even so, the works that remain suggest a writer who moved between popular literary adaptation and more personal verse, leaving behind a small but distinctive record of late 19th- and early 20th-century American writing.