Thomas William Lawson

Born in Massachusetts in 1857, he became a prominent Boston financier, stock promoter, and writer whose public image was as dramatic as his career. He was closely associated with the speculative world of the early 20th-century market, and that experience fed directly into his books and magazine writing.

He is best known in literary circles for Friday, the Thirteenth, a novel built around panic on the stock exchange, and for Frenzied Finance, his sensational series on stock-market abuses and insurance corruption. Contemporary and later reference sources describe him as both a controversial operator and an exposer of financial wrongdoing, which helps explain the unusual energy of his work.

He died in 1925. Today he is remembered less as a conventional novelist than as a vivid American voice from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, writing from inside the machinery of money, speculation, and public scandal.