Harry Castlemon

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Charles Austin Fosdick, courtesy of the Patterson Library, Westfield, New York

Charles Austin Fosdick (September 6, 1842 - August 22, 1915), better known by his nom de plume Harry Castlemon, was a prolific writer of juvenile stories and novels, intended mainly for boys. He was born in Randolph, New York, and received a high school diploma from Central High School in Buffalo, New York. He served in the Union Navy from 1862 to 1865, during the American Civil War, acting as the receiver and superintendent of coal for the Mississippi River Squadron.^[1] Fosdick had begun to write as a teenager, and drew on his experiences serving in the Navy in such early novels as Frank on a Gunboat (1864) and Frank on the Lower Mississippi (1867). He soon became the most-read author for boys in the post-Civil War era, the golden age of children literature.^[2]

Fosdick once remarked that: "Boys don't like fine literature. What they want is adventure, and the more of it you can get in two-hundred-fifty pages of manuscript, the better fellow you are." Fosdick served up a lot of adventure in such popular book series as the Gunboat Series, the Rocky Mountain Series, the Roughing It Series, the Sportsman's Club Series, and The Steel Horse, or the Rambles of a Bicycle.

He was "Uncle Charlie" to famed liberal Baptist minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose writings reflected fondly on the time spent as a boy visiting Fosdick at his home in Westfield, New York.

Fosdick married Sarah Elizabeth Stoddard in 1873, and they spent most of their married life in Westfield.^[3] They are buried beside each other in the Westfield Cemetery.

[edit] References

^ Allibone, Samuel Austin, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and English and American Authors (J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1891).
^ Serafin, Steven & Alfred Bendixen, Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature (Continuum International Publishing Group 2003), p. 1276
^ Hamersly, Lewis Randolph, et al., Who's Who in New York (City and State), L.R. Hamersly & Co., (New York 1904).