J. Ross Browne (for his first name, John) is routinely cited as a minor literary influence on Herman Melville and Mark Twain. His Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes of a Sojourn on the Island of Zanzibar; with a History of the Whale Fishery (1846), for instance, has long been considered by critics to have inspired key aspects of Moby-Dick (1851). Readers since the mid nineteenth century have also recognized more than a few striking similarities between several of Browne's travel narratives written in the 1850s and 1860s and Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp Abroad (1880).

While such distinctions have proved helpful in sustaining limited interest in Browne's writings in the last century and a half, he clearly deserves recognition in his own right. A nascent realist, Browne crusaded against romantic literature a generation before American writers collectively took up the cause of literary realism. Although Browne...