Charles Major was one of America's most successful writers of historical romances and regional adventure novels in the late nineteenth century. His first novel, When Knighthood Was in Flower; or, The Love Story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor (1898), sold more than two hundred thousand copies in two years and remained a best-seller for more than fourteen months. Along with Maurice Thompson, George Barr McCutcheon, Booth Tarkington, David Graham Phillips, and Theodore Dreiser, Major wrote during a period when Hoosier novelists were remarkably popular. He was born in Indianapolis on 25 July 1856 to Stephen and Phoebe Major, both Irish immigrants. Having graduated from his "common school" education in 1872, he attended Michigan University until 1875. He read law with his father, an important Indiana lawyer and judge, and was admitted to the bar in 1877. Major practiced law throughout his life; however, as Richard Banta points out in his study Indiana Authors and Their Books (1949), he accepted only enough cases to maintain a "respectable living," and after the success of his first two novels he only kept his office "in order to have a quiet place to work." He suspended even this nominal practice in 1885 to serve as representative to the Indiana legislature and in the same year married Alice Shaw.
