Frank H. Spearman

Frank Hamilton Spearman was born in Buffalo in 1859. His route to fiction ran through banking: after moving with his wife, Eugenie Lonergan, to McCook, Nebraska, in 1886, he opened the Farmers and Merchants Bank. When drought and the economic troubles of the early 1890s brought that enterprise to an end, the family left for Omaha and then Wheaton, Illinois. Spearman pursued business while writing short fiction in the evenings; in 1898 he turned to writing full time.

Railroad workers, engineers, dispatchers and the machinery of western rail travel gave Spearman a lasting subject. The Nerve of Foley and Other Railroad Stories (1900) and Held for Orders (1901) established his reputation in railroad fiction. Whispering Smith, published in 1906, became his best-known novel and a bestseller. His years in Nebraska gave him a view of the communities that grew around the lines, though his own career had been in banking.

Spearman moved with his family to Hollywood in 1915 and continued publishing fiction. The Marriage Verdict (1923) turns from railroad adventure to questions of marriage, law and religious conviction. Today his name is most often attached to Whispering Smith, while his Nebraska stories also preserve a writer's view of the region's rapid change at the turn of the twentieth century.