A fond de cale

Mayne Reid

Thomas Mayne Reid (4 April 1818 – 22 October 1883) was an Irish British novelist who fought in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). His many works on American life describe colonial policy in the American colonies, the horrors of slave labour, and the lives of American Indians. "Captain" Reid wrote adventure novels akin to those by Frederick Marryat (1792–1848), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). They were set mainly in the American West, Mexico, South Africa, the Himalayas, and Jamaica. He was an admirer of Lord Byron. His novel Quadroon (1856), an anti-slavery work, was later adapted as a play entitled The Octoroon (1859) by Dion Boucicault and produced in New York. While Reid's novels have become almost completely forgotten in the Anglosphere, they have remained popular in Eastern Europe and particularly in Russia (beginning in tsarist times), being considered a part of the canon of Western literature and being published under the category of "World Classics" along with Jack London and James Fenimore Cooper.