Willis George Emerson

Born in Iowa in 1856, Willis George Emerson built a career that stretched well beyond writing. Sources consistently describe him as an American novelist as well as a Chicago newspaperman, lawyer, politician, and promoter, with a life that moved through journalism, law, business, and public life.

He is often noted as an early American science-fiction writer, though his fiction also drew heavily on adventure and Western settings. Among his best-known books is The Smoky God; Or, A Voyage to the Inner World, a strange and memorable novel that helped keep his name alive long after his death. Other surviving works show the same taste for action, exploration, and big, dramatic ideas.

Emerson died in 1918. His reputation today rests less on a single literary movement than on the unusual mix of roles he played and the vivid, sometimes eccentric imagination he brought to his stories.