William Taylor Adams, the popular Oliver Optic of the latter half of the nineteenth century, was born in Medway, Massachusetts, of Captain Laban Adams, a tavern keeper, and Catherine Johnson Adams. A descendant of the Adams line which produced two U.S. presidents, he was an avid and promising student, whose parents sent him to Able Whitney's private school in Boston after he had completed his public schooling. As a boy in Boston, he spent much time on the docks, talking to sailors and others who gathered there. When he was sixteen his family settled in West Roxbury on a farm, where he started to write. After a few years of teaching school in Dorchester, Massachusetts, he traveled widely through the North and South, taking careful and extensive notes (a practice he maintained throughout his writing career). For a short time he helped his father in the Adams...