author
Joseph Earle Stevens
b. 1870
Best known for Yesterdays in the Philippines, this American writer drew on his time in Manila to create a lively firsthand picture of Philippine life at the end of the nineteenth century. His work blends travel writing, memoir, and social observation in a way that still feels immediate.
1 Audiobook
Yesterdays in the Philippines
by Joseph Earle Stevens
About the author
Born in 1870, Joseph Earle Stevens was an American writer whose surviving reputation rests mainly on Yesterdays in the Philippines, published in 1898. Sources such as Wikisource identify him as an American merchant and rancher as well as a writer, and bibliographic records from the Library of Congress and Project Gutenberg confirm his authorship of that book.
Yesterdays in the Philippines draws on Stevens's experience as a former resident of Manila. The book is a personal, observant account of everyday life in the Philippines during the late Spanish colonial period, and it has remained of interest as both travel writing and a historical snapshot of a changing world.
Available source material on his life is fairly limited, but public records indicate he lived from February 8, 1870, to April 10, 1961. No suitable verified portrait image was found on the sources checked, so a profile image is not included here.