author
Will Lillibridge
1878–1909
A prairie novelist who balanced dentistry by day with fiction at night, he turned firsthand Dakota experience into vivid stories of ranch life and the western plains. His career was brief, but books like Ben Blair and Where the Trail Divides helped make him one of South Dakota's best-known early novelists.
4 Audiobooks
Ben Blair The Story of a Plainsman
by Will Lillibridge
Where the Trail Divides
by Will Lillibridge
A Breath of Prairie and other stories
by Will Lillibridge
The Dominant Dollar
by Will Lillibridge
About the author
Born in 1878, Will Lillibridge — also known as William Otis Lillibridge — grew up with the prairie landscapes that would later shape his fiction. He studied dentistry at the State University of Iowa and practiced as a dentist, while building a second life as a writer.
Lillibridge became known for western and plains-set novels drawn from real knowledge of Dakota life. Reference sources including LibriVox, Project Gutenberg, and The Online Books Page list works such as Ben Blair, Where the Trail Divides, The Dominant Dollar, The Dissolving Circle, and the posthumous collection A Breath of Prairie, and Other Stories.
He died in 1909 while still very young, and that early death cut short a promising literary career. Even so, his fiction remained in circulation, and his name is still closely linked with early twentieth-century writing about the northern plains.