author
b. 1875
Best known for a lively 1916 travel narrative about a motorboat trip along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, this early-20th-century writer captured the feel of the Potomac Valley with warmth and curiosity.
by John Pryor Cowan
John Pryor Cowan was an American author born in 1875. The work most clearly linked to him online is Sometub's Cruise on the C. & O. Canal: The Narrative of a Motorboat Vacation in the Heart of Maryland, published in 1916 and later preserved by Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.
That book follows a summer journey along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and is remembered for its mix of travel writing, local history, and easygoing observation. From the surviving record, Cowan seems to be known today mainly through this book rather than through a large published bibliography.
Reliable biographical details beyond his birth year are scarce in the sources I could confirm, so it is best to treat him as a lightly documented regional travel writer of the early 1900s. I could not verify a suitable portrait from the pages available.