He was born in 1837 in Vevay, Indiana, and his early life was spent amid the “noble scenery” on the banks of the Ohio River. His father died while he was a young boy, and he himself was too delicate to spend much time at school, so that he is a shining example of those who move up the inclined plane of self-culture and self-improvement. As he himself has forcefully said, through his whole life two men have struggled within him for the ascendency, the religious devotee and the literary man. His early training was “after the straitest sect of his religion”――the fervid Methodism of fifty years ago, and he was almost morbidly scrupulous as a boy, not even allowing himself to read a novel, though from this early period he always felt in himself a future literary career, and the teacher who corrected his compositions naively said to him: “I have marked your composition very severely because you are destined to become an author.” At first the religious element in his nature decidedly held sway and he devoted himself to the ministry, mounting a horse and going forth with his saddle-bags as a circuit preacher in a circuit of ten preaching places. This was followed by a still harder experience in the border country of Minnesota, where in moccasins he tramped from town to town preaching to lumbermen and living on a meagre pittance, eating crackers and cheese, often in broken health and expecting an early death. But even this earnest life of religious devotion and sacrifice was interspersed with attempts at literary work and he wrote a critical essay on “Beranger and his Songs” while he was trying to evangelize the red-shirted lumbermen of St. Croix. It was in such life and amid such experiences that Eggleston gained his keen knowledge of human nature which has been the delight and charm of his books. He began his literary career as associate editor of the “Little Corporal” at Evanston, Illinois, in 1866, and in 1870 he rose to the position of literary editor of the New York “Independent,” of which he was for a time superintending editor. For five years, from 1874 to 1879, he was pastor of the Church of Christian Endeavor in Brooklyn, but failing health compelled him to retire, and he made his home at “Owl’s Nest,” on Lake George, where he has since devoted himself to literary work. His novels depict the rural life of Southern Indiana, and his own judgment upon them is as follows: “I should say that what distinguishes my novels from other works of fiction is the prominence which they give to social conditions; that the individual characters are here treated to a greater degree than elsewhere as parts of a study of a society, as in some sense the logical result of the environment. Whatever may be the rank assigned to these stories as works of literary art, they will always have a certain value as materials for the student of social history.”