author

William Farquhar Payson

1876–1939

Best remembered for an early lost-colony adventure, this American writer built a small but intriguing place in speculative fiction. His work blends historical mystery with the imaginative flavor of turn-of-the-century adventure storytelling.

1 Audiobook

John Vytal: A Tale of the Lost Colony

John Vytal: A Tale of the Lost Colony

by William Farquhar Payson

About the author

Born in New York on February 18, 1876, William Farquhar Payson was an American author remembered today mainly for John Vytal: A Tale of the Lost Colony (1901). Reference sources agree that he died in Bristol, Rhode Island, on April 15, 1939.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that John Vytal offers a fictional explanation for the disappearance of the Roanoke colonists, turning that historical mystery into a story with lost-race elements. That makes Payson a small but interesting figure in early American speculative fiction, especially for readers curious about how adventure novels and fantasy ideas overlapped at the start of the twentieth century.

Reliable biographical detail on his life appears to be limited in the sources I could confirm, so it is safest to remember him chiefly through that novel and its place in early genre history.