Pen name J. B. Jones Name John Jones Spouse Frances Custis | Nationality American Language English Role Writer | |
Born John Beauchamp Jones
March 6, 1810
Baltimore, Maryland ( 1810-03-06 ) Occupation Writer, editor, publisher Died February 4, 1866, Burlington, New Jersey, United States Books Wild Western Scenes, The Life And Adventur, The War‑Path: A Narrativ, Border War: A Tale of Disunion, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at t | ||
John Beauchamp Jones (March 6, 1810 – February 4, 1866) was a writer whose books enjoyed popularity during the mid 19th century. Jones was a popular novelist (particularly of the American West and the American South) and a well-connected literary editor and political journalist in the two decades leading up to the American Civil War.
Contents
Jones's fiction and activities as an editor attracted the attention of other literary notables of the period, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. Jones' early novels, Wild Western Scenes: A Narrative of Adventures in the Western Wilderness, Forty Years Ago (1841), The Western Merchant: A Narrative . . . (1849), and Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of His Exploits at Home, during His Travels, and in the Cities; Designed to Amuse and Instruct (1854), capture the picturesque and generally Edenic qualities of the West, where he spent his early years.
Jones' novels commend the honesty of "the People" and predict their abiding success, based on the democratic republicanism of Thomas Jefferson
During the Civil War, Jones worked as a clerk in the Confederate War Department in Richmond, Virginia as recounted in A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (1866), published in the year of his death.
In popular culture
Jones makes a brief, humorous cameo in chapter 3 of Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, a science fiction novel set in the 1860s.
Works
Novels
Diary