Description

Ann Sophia Stephens (1810-86) was an American novelist and magazine editor. She was the author of numerous "dime" novels and is credited as the progenitor of that genre. She married Edward Stephens, a printer from Plymouth, Mass., in 1831 and they relocated to Portland, Maine where they co-founded, published and edited the Portland Magazine, a monthly literary periodical where some of her first work appeared. The magazine was sold in 1837 and the couple moved to New York where Ann took the job of editor of The Ladies Companion. Over the next few years she wrote over 25 serial novels plus short stories and poems for several well known magazines including Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's Magazine. Her first novel to be published in book form, Fashion and Famine, appeared in 1851 and in 1856 she started her own mangazizne, Mrs Stephens' Illustrated New Monthly, published by her husband. Her novel Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, which had originally been serialised in the Ladies Companion in 1839, became the first title to be published in Beadle & Adams's Beadle's Dime Novels series in June 1860, and was swiftly followed by many others following its huge popular success. This novel was first published in 1869.