W. H. (William Henry) Rhodes

Born in Windsor, North Carolina, in 1822, William Henry Rhodes studied law at Harvard and went on to build a varied career that took him through Texas and eventually to California. Alongside his legal work, he wrote poetry, essays, and fiction, moving easily between public life and literary pursuits.

In California, he became associated with journalism and the literary scene of San Francisco and Sacramento. He published work under the pseudonym "Caxton," and his 1871 story The Case of Summerfield has often been singled out by later readers as an unusually early science-fiction tale, mixing sensational storytelling with speculative ideas.

Rhodes also wrote poetry collected in The Indian Gallows, and Other Poems, and a posthumous volume, Caxton's Book, gathered more of his essays, poems, tales, and sketches. He died in 1876, but his reputation has endured because his writing captures both the rough energy of the American West and the playful imagination of a writer experimenting before modern genre boundaries were fully formed.