Hulbert Footner (1879-1944)

William Hulbert Footner arrived in New York from Canada in 1898. His first bits of writing are poetry in the back of an appointment book that he started upon his arrival. He moved from job to job and decided to become an actor after he realized that he would never have the opportunity for an education. He was a bad actor and drifted into writing. His first known published article, an account of a canoe trip from Greenwich Village to Albany on the Hudson River, appeared in Field and Stream in 1904. The next year, with a freelance assignment from a New York paper, Footner took the first of two long voyages by canoe, hundreds of miles through Alberta and the Northwest Territories, sending back his dispatches to New York and to several Canadian papers. Those adventures, also, resulted in his first full length book, New Rivers of the North, followed by several adventure novels set in northwest Canada. A few years later h e arrived in Maryland in his canoe and eventually settled down permanently in an old house on the Patuxent River. In his lifetime, he had more than fifty novels published including a rash of detective stories in the 1920s featuring a liberated woman detective whom he named Madame Rosika Storey. Several of his books became movies and he wrote plays, a couple of which reached Broadway. At the end of his writing career he wrote a half a dozen books about Maryland including the two listed here which are available in print fifty eight years after his death.