Thomas Mayne Reid

Thomas Mayne Reid (Mayne Reid), 1818-83, British novelist, b. Ireland. He emigrated to the United States in 1840 and after various adventures in the West served as a lieutenant in the Mexican War. He returned to England and began writing adventure stories that were especially popular with boys. The first of these was The Rifle Rangers (1850). Others include The Scalp Hunters (1851), The White Chief (1855), and The Headless Horseman (1866).

Reid, [Thomas] Mayne (1818–83), Irish‐born novelist, came to the U.S. (1840), where he had a varied career as journalist, storekeeper, overseer of slaves, schoolmaster, captain in the Mexican War, actor, dramatist, Indian fighter, and frontier hunter. He returned to England (1850) and was in America again only from 1867 to 1870, but during his years in the U.S. he knew not only the East but also the South, the prairies, and the Western frontier. He wrote a long series of romances, whose exciting adventures endeared him to millions of boys, and whose descriptions of the Southern and Western U.S. made him a prominent foreign follower of Cooper in depicting pioneer customs and the life of the Indians. His bibliography includes more than 90 titles, nearly 70 of which are stories of romance and adventure, many of them concerned with the American scene. Among the most popular were The Rifle Rangers (1850), The Scalp Hunters (1851), and The Boy Hunters (1852). One of his plays, The Quadroon (1856), was the basis of Boucicault's The Octoroon.