Name Charles Finger Awards John Newbery Medal Education King's College London | Died January 7, 1941 Role Author | |
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Books Tales from Silver Lands, High Water In Arkansas, Highwaymen, Courageous companions, The Tragic Story of Oscar Wil | ||
Charles Joseph Finger (December 25, 1869 – January 7, 1941) was a British American writer and musician.
Biography
Finger was born in Willesden, England, and educated at King's College London. He traveled extensively as a young man, visiting North America, South America, and Africa. He eventually settled in the United States, in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He became the acting editor of the Reedy's Mirror after William Marion Reedy's death in 1920.
Finger won the 1925 Newbery Medal for the book Tales from Silver Lands (1924), a collection of stories from South America. Some of his other works are Bushrangers (1924), Tales Worth Telling (1927), Courageous Companions (1929), and A Dog at His Heel (1936). His autobiography is Seven Horizons (1930).
Finger was an accomplished musician. He directed the San Angelo Conservatory of Music in Texas, from 1898 to 1904. One of his piano students in San Angelo was David Wendel Guion, who achieved notability for arranging and popularizing the ballad "Home on the Range".
The epitaph on Finger's gravestone is "This voyage done, set sail and steer once more To further landfall on some nobler shore." He is buried in the Farmington, Arkansas cemetery.