Yet, after his death in 1902, an anonymous obituary writer called him "as distinct an embodiment of the American spirit in one sort as Mark Twain was in another."
Francis Richard Stockton was born in Philadelphia on 5 April 1834 to an elderly father, William Smith Stockton, and his young second wife, Emily Hepsibeth Drean Stockton. William Stockton was a strict Methodist leader and pamphleteer who descended collaterally from Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. William Stockton was actively involved in the creation of a schism within the Methodist church in America and vied for leadership of the offshoot, the Methodist Protestant church, with his oldest son, Frank Stockton's half brother Thomas Hewlings Stockton, who shared the podium with Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and whom Henry Clay called the best pulpit orator of the day. Emily Hepsibeth Drean was from Leesburg, Virginia, and her influence is apparent in Stockton's sympathy for the South before the Civil War, his choice of wife, and the whimsical, fanciful tone of his stories as well as the subject matter for many of his southern stories.
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