Samuel W. Odell

Born in 1864 and dying in 1948, Samuel W. Odell was an American lawyer and author. Reliable reference sources describe him as the writer of Atlanteans; Adam Lore's Choice: Stories for Young Men (1889) and The Last War; Or, The Triumph of the English Tongue (1898), a future-war novel that has kept his name alive with readers of early science fiction.

Catalog and library records also connect him with other fiction, including Elizabeth and The Princess Athura: A Romance of Iran, published in 1913. Taken together, his books suggest a writer interested in both imaginative futures and distant historical worlds.

Odell is not a widely documented literary figure, so much of what can be confirmed today comes from bibliographic and archival sources rather than detailed biographical profiles. Even so, his work offers a glimpse of late-19th- and early-20th-century popular fiction, especially the era's fascination with speculative war stories and romantic adventure.