Mary (Mary C. Johnson) Dillon

Writing as Mary C. Johnson Dillon, she published several novels in the early 20th century, many of them rooted in American history and regional life. Project Gutenberg lists her under both Mary Dillon and Mary C. Johnson, and her surviving works show a steady interest in places, communities, and moments of change in the American past.

Her best-known titles include The Rose of Old St. Louis, a historical novel first published in 1904, and In Old Bellaire, published in 1906. Later books such as The American (1919) and The Farmer of Roaring Run (1920) suggest a career that stretched across changing literary tastes while staying close to stories of character, duty, and local color.

Reliable biographical details about her life are limited in the sources available here, and even her death year appears inconsistently in online records. What is clear is that her fiction has remained accessible through major public-domain archives, giving modern readers an easy way to rediscover a once-popular historical storyteller.