Born in Pierrepont, New York, Irving Bacheller graduated from St. Lawrence University in 1882 after which he accepted a job with the Daily Hotel Reporter; by 1883 he was working for the Brooklyn Daily Times. Two years later, he established a business to provide specialized articles to the major Sunday newspapers. It was through the Bacheller Syndicate that he brought to American readers the writings of British authors such as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling. He also established a working partnership with the young author and journalist Stephen Crane, whose novel The Red Badge of Courage became famous after it appeared in syndication. Several years later, Bacheller hired Crane to act as a war correspondent in Cuba during the insurrection against Spain; on the journey there, Crane's ship foundered off the coast of Florida, and he was stranded on a dinghy for two days. This experience resulted in his short story "The Open Boat".Irving Bacheller began to write fiction, publishing "The Master of Silence" in 1892 and "Still House of O'Darrow" in 1894. Although he was appointed Sunday editor of the New York World in 1898, he soon chose to pursue a full-time career as a fiction writer and two years later left journalism for a while. Writing novels primarily concerned with early American life in the North Country of New York State, in 1900 his novel Eben Holden, subtitled A Tale of the North Country, proved a major success, and was the fourth best-selling novel in the United States in 1900. In 1901 the book was still ranked fifth for the year and his next novel issued that year titled D'ri and I was tenth in annual sales. Sixteen years later, Bacheller's work The Light in the Clearing was the No.2 best-selling book in America and in 1920, A Man for the Ages was fifth.Irving Bacheller died in White Plains, New York in 1950. In recent years, several of his works have been reprinted and a previously unpublished manuscript, titled Lost in the Fog, was published in 1990.
