John Beauchamp Jones

John Beauchamp Jones worked as a novelist, newspaper editor, and political journalist during a mobile nineteenth-century career. Born in Baltimore in 1810, he learned the printing trade and wrote fiction while holding editorial posts in several American cities. Wild Western Scenes, first published in 1841, became his best-known novel and went through numerous editions. Its frontier setting, quick action, and comic episodes placed it within the popular literature of westward expansion, although Jones wrote from an editorial life largely based in eastern cities. He later edited newspapers including the Southern Monitor and the Daily Madisonian. During the Confederacy he served as a clerk in the War Department at Richmond and kept a diary that became a substantial record of civilian administration and daily conditions. Wild Western Scenes belongs to an earlier phase of that varied career, when Jones used the conventions of adventure fiction to reach a broad reading public before his later documentary writing assumed historical importance.