James Stevens

James Stevens was an American writer born in Iowa in 1892 and raised partly in Idaho. He left home young and worked in logging camps, sawmills, and other jobs in the Pacific Northwest, experiences that became the backbone of his fiction and essays.

He is best remembered for popularizing the Paul Bunyan stories in the 1920s, and his writing often focused on loggers, laborers, and life in the woods. His novel Big Jim Turner drew on his early years in Northwest logging country, and he also became known as an important early voice in regional literature.

Stevens died on December 31, 1971. His work is still noted for its plainspoken energy and for capturing a rugged slice of American life that many writers had ignored.