Wanted

Wanted is a short work by Paul Leicester Ford (1865-1902), the American historian, bibliographer, and novelist whose remarkable career produced major scholarly editions of Thomas Jefferson and the Federalist Papers alongside several bestselling popular novels before his murder by his brother in 1902 at age thirty-seven.

Ford’s bibliographic output was vast for someone who died so young. He produced more than two hundred books, pamphlets, articles, and edited volumes across his working life, with serious work in early American historical scholarship sitting alongside the popular fiction that paid the bills. He was self-educated rather than university-trained, his early childhood spinal curvature having prevented him from attending school regularly, and his scholarship reflected the personal interests of a wealthy and intellectually serious young man who could organize his own reading without institutional direction.

Wanted likely belongs to Ford’s popular fiction or short narrative output rather than to his scholarly editorial work. The title is broad enough to fit several possible book categories. It could be a romance, an adventure novel, a mystery, or a satirical or topical piece in the various lighter modes Ford worked in across his career. Without more specific bibliographic information, the exact character of the book is difficult to specify.

Ford’s popular fiction generally combined competent craft with the topical interest in contemporary American social and economic developments. The Honorable Peter Stirling had dramatized the corruption of urban political machines and the prospects for reform politics. The Great K. and A. Robbery had used the developing American railroad system as its setting. Various of his other novels engaged with similar contemporary American material in different ways.

The Ford murder in 1902 was a notorious incident in the New York literary world. Ford’s brother Malcolm had developed serious financial and personal difficulties, had been cut off from family support, and had come to Ford’s New York home demanding money. The confrontation ended with Malcolm shooting Ford and then himself. The double death ended one of the more productive careers in late-nineteenth-century American letters.

The book pairs with Ford’s other fiction and with the broader Ford bibliography that researchers have continued to work through across the past century.