Will N. (Will Nathaniel) Harben

Born in Dalton, Georgia, on July 5, 1858, he built his fiction around the people and landscapes he knew best. Reliable reference sources describe him as an American writer who specialized in stories about the mountains of northern Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia notes that he was among the country’s popular novelists in the first decades of the twentieth century.

His work is remembered for colorful regional detail and for bringing Appalachian and rural southern characters to a broad audience. Titles associated with him include Westerfelt, Pole Baker, and The Hills of Refuge, and many of his books remain accessible through public-domain collections.

He died in New York City on August 7, 1919. Although later literary history has tended to place him outside the front rank of major American authors, his fiction still offers a lively window into the tastes of his era and the imagined life of north Georgia at the turn of the century.