Paul Leicester Ford

Paul Leicester Ford worked across bibliography, editing, biography, and fiction during a brief career that joined documentary scholarship to popular historical storytelling. Educated at home after a childhood spinal injury, he drew on his father’s extensive Americana library and began printing research while still young. A List of Treasury Reports and Circulars represents his bibliographical work, while The True George Washington 10Th Ed points to the biography that presented Washington in more human terms than conventional hero worship. His fiction included The Story of an Untold Love and the railway adventure The Great K. and A. Robbery. The abbreviated Wanted is associated with his later comic novellas about courtship and social convention. Ford edited major collections of writings by Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson and produced studies of Benjamin Franklin. His novels The Honorable Peter Stirling and Janice Meredith became substantial successes, showing how his command of political and historical records could support character-driven fiction. He died in New York in 1902 at thirty-seven.