Whittaker, Frederick
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1838-1889) UK-born author, in USA from 1850; perhaps best known for The Complete Biography of George Armstrong Custer (1876 2vols), which was adulatory. Of his Dime-Novel SF, The Grizzly-Hunters; Or, the Navahoe Captives: A Tale of the Lost City of the Sierras (1871) is a Lost Race tale set in a secret City, which turns out to be inhabited by Aztecs; the two white daughters of the king marry the two white protagonists (see Race in SF); the eponymous bears may also be survivals of an earlier epoch. In The Lost Captain; Or, Skipper Jabez Coffin's Cruise to the Open Polar Sea (1880 Saturday Journal; 1906), the search for the protagonist's father takes his rescuers to a clement region surrounding the North Pole, a Lost World inhabited by a complex array of Vikings, who make slaves of those they conquer (see Slavery). All ends well, however, for the large cast. [JC]
Captain Frederick Whittaker
born London: 12 December 1838
died Mount Vernon, New York: 13 May 1889
works (selected)
- The Grizzly-Hunters; Or, the Navahoe Captives: A Tale of the Lost City of the Sierras (New York: Beadle and Adams, 1871) [in the publisher's Beadle's Dime Novels series: pb/]
- The Lost Captain; Or, Skipper Jabez Coffin's Cruise to the Open Polar Sea (New York: Beadle and Adams, 1880) [first appeared 1880 Saturday Journal: in the publisher's Beadle's Half-Dime Library series: pb/]
- Transgressing the Law (New York: Robert Bonner's Sons, 1892) [illus: Warren B Davis: hb/]
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