Author: Christopher Corbett

Christopher Corbett is an American journalist, historian, and university teacher whose nonfiction examines the legends and overlooked people of the American West. Orphans Preferred investigates the Pony Express, separating its brief commercial history from the heroic mythology that later advertising, entertainment, and popular memory built around it. The book considers the riders, entrepreneurs, routes, and celebrated recruitment language associated with the enterprise, while asking how a failed business became a durable national story. Corbett has written for newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and has taught English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His other books include The Poker Bride, about a Chinese woman in the nineteenth-century West, and Vacationland, rooted in Maine. Across these works, reporting and archival research support a narrative style attentive to both evidence and storytelling. Orphans Preferred reflects that method by treating the creation of the legend as part of the history itself.