John Fox Jr.

John Fox, Jr. (December 16, 1862 - July 8, 1919) was an American journalist, novelist, and short story writer. Fox was born in Stony Point, Kentucky, in the family of John William Fox Sr. and Minerva Worth Carr. He studied English at Harvard University. He graduated in 1883 before becoming a reporter in New York. After working for The New York Times and The New York Sun, he published the successful serialization of his first novel, Mountain Europe, in Vek magazine in 1892. It was followed by two moderately successful storybooks, as well as his first regular novel, Kentucky in 1898. Fox was promoted to war correspondent while working for Harper's Weekly in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, where he served in The Rough Riders. Six years later, he went to Asia to talk about the Russo-Japanese War for Scribner magazine. Although he sometimes wrote for periodicals, after 1904 Fox devoted much of his attention to fiction. The Little Shepherd of the Royal Advent (published in 1903) and The Trail of the Lonely Pine (published in 1908) are perhaps his most famous and successful works, which were included in the ten best-selling novels of The New York Times for 1903, 1904, 1908 and 1909, respectively. In The Lone Pine Trail, the character Devil Judd Tolliver was based on the real life of Devil John by Wesley Wright, the sheriff of Wise County, Virginia. Many of his works reflected a naturalistic style, his childhood in the Kentucky Bluegrass area and his life among the Big Stone Break miners, Virginia. Many of his novels were historical novels or historical dramas set in this region. John Fox Jr. passed away in 1919 from pneumonia in the Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and was buried at a family site in Paris, Kentucky. His marriage to the Austrian opera singer Fritz Scheff in 1908 lasted a little over four years. He had no children.