author
James Edmund Dunning
1873–1931
An American diplomat, businessman, and novelist, he moved between public service and literary work with unusual ease. His career took him from U.S. consular posts in Europe to books and stories that still surface in classic-literature collections.
1 Audiobook
Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories; Second Series
by Mary Antin, Elizabeth Ashe, Kathleen Carman, Cornelia A. P. (Cornelia Atwood Pratt) Comer, Mazo De la Roche, Annie Hamilton Donnell, James Edmund Dunning, Rebecca Hooper Eastman, William Addleman Ganoe, Lucy Huffaker, Joseph Husband, S. H. Kemper, Christina Krysto, Ellen Mackubin, Edith Ronald Mirrielees, Margaret Prescott Montague, Edward Morlae, Meredith Nicholson, Kathleen Thompson Norris, Laura Spencer Portor, Lucy Pratt, Elsie Singmaster, Charles Haskins Townsend, Edith Wyatt
About the author
Born in Bangor, Maine, on October 2, 1873, James Edmund Dunning built a varied career that reached well beyond the literary world. Sources describe him as a newspaper editor and proprietor in Maine before he entered U.S. consular service, serving in Milan from 1905 to 1909, then in Le Havre from 1909 to 1912, and later in a wider supervisory role in Europe.
Alongside that public career, he published fiction and nonfiction. His 1909 novel The Master Builders is the work most easily traced today in major library catalogs and digital collections, and he also appeared as a contributor to Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories; Second Series. Another surviving work, The Roman Road to Portslade (1925), shows an interest in history and place as well as storytelling.
He died in 1931. While detailed personal biographical material is limited in the sources I could confirm, the record that does survive suggests a writer with an unusually broad life experience—part diplomat, part man of affairs, and part author whose work still lingers in archives and public-domain libraries.