James Otis Kaler, a popular and prolific writer of boys' adventure stories in the late nineteenth century, is remembered today as the author of Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus (1881), a work which has gone through some thirty editions and remains in print. His other writings--numbering some one hundred and fifty--are largely forgotten, although many of them saw more than one printing in the author's lifetime. Aside from his authorship of Toby Tyler, he merits consideration because he so typified that late nineteenth-century spirit combining individualism, moralism, didacticism, and national pride.

Kaler, the son of James Otis and Maria Thompson Kaler, was born in Frankfort (now Winterport), Maine, on 19 March 1848. His father owned a summer hotel in Scarboro, and his childhood appears to have been happy, if uneventful. Writing seems to have been his calling and he was probably little more than thirteen when he went...