Emerson Bennett enjoyed great popularity among nineteenth-century readers of romances and westerns. Between 1847 and 1880 he published more than thirty books in addition to hundreds of short stories and serialized tales. His prolific output is largely formulaic: kidnappings, outlaw gangs, virtuous maidens, and surprise revelations abound. Bennett first gained fame with stories of the American West, and he relied heavily upon common Eastern conceptions of frontier adventure, degeneracy, and opportunity. His fiction also draws upon sentimental romance, in which stock characters, contrived plots, and idealistic endings often exaggerate the successes of Samuel Richardson and James Fenimore Cooper. Bennett's imitation of the latter, in particular, prompted the ridicule of that exponent of literary realism Mark Twain; in Roughing It (1872) Twain mocks the diction of Cooper's Indians, comparing their talk to the remarks "a Broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett's works."

Bennett benefited from the emerging...