author

Lettie Artley Irons

A little-known 19th-century dime-novel writer, she left behind frontier adventure fiction and poems that still feel tied to the fast-moving world of popular publishing. Writing under the pen name Paul J. Prescott, she published work despite years of serious illness.

1 Audiobook

Nat, The Trapper and Indian-Fighter

Nat, The Trapper and Indian-Fighter

by Lettie Artley Irons

About the author

Lettie Artley Irons was an American writer associated with Beadle-style popular fiction in the late 19th century. Sources from Northern Illinois University’s House of Beadle & Adams note that she published many poems in the Saturday Journal in the early 1870s and wrote fiction under the pseudonym Paul J. Prescott.

Her best-known surviving work is Nat, The Trapper and Indian-Fighter, a frontier adventure that was also issued under variant titles and in several Beadle series. The same sources indicate that her serial Wild Nathan began in 1870, and that her stories were reprinted more than once, suggesting she had a real place in the lively dime-novel market of her day.

Very little personal information appears to have survived. Contemporary notice reported in the Saturday Journal said she died in 1875, and later bibliographic notes describe her as an invalid who wrote while enduring long illness; they also identify her as the sister of writer Archie C. Irons.