John Dodge

An early American memoirist, John Dodge is chiefly remembered for Narrative of Mr. John Dodge during his Captivity at Detroit. The work was first published in Philadelphia in 1779, with a second edition appearing in Danvers, Massachusetts, in 1780, and it presents his own account of imprisonment and suffering at Detroit during the American Revolutionary period.

What gives Dodge a lasting place in early American writing is the direct, personal quality of that narrative. Rather than a polished literary career, he seems to have been a writer of experience: the book survives because it captures fear, endurance, and the brutal uncertainty of frontier warfare in a way later readers and historians continued to value.

Reliable biographical detail about his wider life is limited from the sources I could confirm here, so it is safest to remember him as the author of a single important captivity narrative rather than to claim a fuller career that may not be well documented.