A banker for most of his life, Edward Noyes Westcott blended characteristics of the realism and local-color movements that emerged after the 1850s in his novel David Harum: A Story of American Life (1898). A significant contribution to popular fiction at the turn of the century, Westcott's book may be associated with the regional writing that emerged after the Civil War, works that exploited local customs and dialects in fiction or verse.

Born in Syracuse, New York, the third child of Amos and Clara Babcock Westcott, Westcott spent most of his life in his native city. Drawn early to banking, he left school at sixteen to assume a position as a junior clerk in the Mechanics' Bank of Syracuse. He worked there until 1866, when he went to New York City to take a position in the office of the Mutual Life Insurance Company. Two years later he returned to...