1871 Best Seller.

From age 19 Eggleston was an itinerant preacher until travelling broke his health.

The books relates the experiences of a young man sent to be the only teacher of a backwoods rural Indiana town. It is an early example of American realist fiction.

1896 Best Seller.

Tom Grogan is a stevedore on the 1890s New York City docks. Tom dies unexpectedly and his wife Mary decides to carry on his business by taking Toms place. It is not easy to maintain the fiction that she is Tom Grogan, nor to keep the business afloat in the face of many challenges.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1902.

This novel was the grandfather of the Western genre and follows a natural gentleman as he is entangled with the new Wyoming state's 1890s Johnson County War - the ugly side of the consolidation of The American West. A cabal of large vested interests and a diffuse collection of small players fight for control of access rights to publicly owned common range land. Rhetoric and actions escalate and culminated in some nasty lynchings, the use of a gang of hired Texan killers (with the tacit approval of the state Governor), the murder of a small rancher, the siege of the Texans by a posse of 200, and their eventual rescue by the U.S. sixth cavalry at the orders of the president.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1903.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1909.

This story of a French Irish girl whose husband is killed in a duel was originally published anonymously.

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1905.

The appearance of a new novel by Mrs. Humphrey Ward is always a literary event of the first magnitude. -- New York Times, 1905