Publisher's Synopsis
WILL N. HARBEN (1858-1919). Born and raised in Dalton, Ga., William Nathaniel Harben worked in the family mercantile business until he was thirty. He moved to New York City in 1888 and began a career as a writer. Between 1888 and his death in 1919, he wrote prolifically, publishing thirty books in a broad range of genres, including local color, detective fiction, social gospel, romance, science fiction, and literary realism. He made regular visits to his hometown throughout his life, marrying Maybelle Chandler on one such visit in 1896.Most of Harbens works are set in the South, several in Darley, his fictional version of Dalton. His first novel, White Marie: A Story of Georgia Plantation Life, is a melodrama about a white woman raised as a slave. Its intentionally ambiguous attitude toward slavery and racism caused a significant amount of controversy at the time of its publication. Following White Marie, Harben published several experimental works, including a science fiction novel in the style of Jules Verne and three detective novels in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1900 Harben published a collection of stories, Northern Georgia Sketches, that came to the attention of influential editor William Dean Howells, who promoted Harben's work.Harben's most significant works concern the lives of mountain people of North Georgia. The two most successful, Abner Daniel and Ann Boyd, portray the homespun pragmatism and deeply rooted religious conviction endemic to the insular Appalachian community. But he is perhaps most famous for his use of North Georgia mountain dialect and colloquialism. In his last years, Harben wrote a pair of melodramatic potboilers under the pseudonym Virginia Demarest and several novels under his own name.
