author
William R. (William Rheem) Lighton
1866–1923
A self-taught American writer with a reporter’s eye and a storyteller’s touch, he moved easily between frontier history, rural fiction, and magazine journalism. His books often draw on life in the American West and Midwest, including the Arkansas farm that inspired some of his later work.
1 Audiobook
Lewis and Clark Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
by William R. (William Rheem) Lighton
About the author
Born in 1866, William Rheem Lighton was an American author and journalist whose work ranged from novels and historical writing to magazine pieces. Sources on his archival record describe him as largely educated at home after a childhood injury kept him out of school for several years, and note that he had begun writing while still very young.
Lighton spent time in the West, including a year teaching in New Mexico, and later wrote fiction shaped by rural life and frontier settings. He is credited with works such as Lewis and Clark and with stories featuring "Billy Fortune," and later readers also remembered him for reporting on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
In 1908 he bought land near Fayetteville, Arkansas, which he called Happy Hollow Farm. That farm became an important part of his later life and writing, reflecting his interest in practical agriculture as well as storytelling. He died in 1923.