author
Lorimer Stoddard
1864–1901
Remembered for a vivid frontier tale and a brief but active stage career, this late-19th-century American writer moved between fiction and theater with unusual ease. He came from a literary family, and his work still carries the energy of that world.
1 Audiobook
The Indian's Hand 1892
by Lorimer Stoddard
About the author
Lorimer Stoddard was an American writer, actor, and playwright who lived from 1863 to 1901. He is best known today for The Indian's Hand and for the stage adaptation In the Palace of the King, produced in 1900 for actress Viola Allen.
He was the son of writer Richard Henry Stoddard and novelist-poet Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, so literature was close at hand from the beginning. That background seems to have shaped a career that crossed several forms, from short fiction to dramatic writing and work for the theater.
Although he died young, Stoddard left behind work that still interests readers of historical fiction, weird western tales, and turn-of-the-century drama. His small surviving body of work offers a glimpse of an author writing at the meeting point of popular storytelling and the American stage.