author
Roswell Martin Field
1851–1919
A longtime newspaper man and novelist, he brought a journalist’s eye for scene and character to his fiction. Best known today for works like The Romance of an Old Fool, he was also part of the literary Field family of St. Louis.
1 Audiobook
The Romance of an Old Fool
by Roswell Martin Field
About the author
Born in St. Louis on September 1, 1851, Roswell Martin Field Jr. was the younger brother of writer Eugene Field. He worked in journalism in several American cities, including San Francisco, St. Louis, Kansas City, New York, and Chicago, before building a reputation as an author in his own right.
Field wrote novels and shorter pieces, and his surviving work includes The Bondage of Ballinger, In Sunflower Land, and The Romance of an Old Fool. His career seems to have moved easily between newsroom writing and literary work, which helps explain the direct, readable style associated with his fiction.
He died on January 10, 1919. Although he is not as widely remembered as some of his contemporaries, his books still offer a glimpse of a late 19th- and early 20th-century American writer shaped by both journalism and family ties to a well-known literary household.