John Beauchamp Jones’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

John Beauchamp Jones (March 6, 1810 – February 4, 1866) was a writer whose books enjoyed popularity during the mid 19th century. Jones was a popular novelist (particularly of the American West and the American South) and a well-connected literary editor and political journalist in the two decades leading up to the American Civil War.

Jones’s fiction and activities as an editor attracted the attention of other literary notables of the period, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms. Jones’ early novels, Wild Western Scenes: A Narrative of Adventures in the Western Wilderness, Forty Years Ago (1841), The Western Merchant: A Narrative . . . (1849), and Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of His Exploits at Home, during His Travels, and in the Cities; Designed to Amuse and Instruct (1854), capture the picturesque and generally Edenic qualities of the West, where he spent his early years.

Jones’ novels commend the honesty of “the People” and predict their abiding success, based on the democratic republicanism of Thomas Jefferson

During the Civil War, Jones worked as a clerk in the Confederate War Department in Richmond, Virginia as recounted in A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (1866), published in the year of his death.

In popular culture

Jones makes a brief, humorous cameo in chapter 3 of Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, a science fiction novel set in the 1860s.

Works

Novels

• Wild Western Scenes, Grigg, Elliot and Co., 1849 [Luke Shortfield, pseud.].
• The Western Merchant: A Narrative. Containing Useful Instruction for the Western Man of Business, Grigg, Elliot & Co., [Luke Shortfield, pseud.] 1849.
• The City Merchant: or, The Mysterious Failure, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1851.
• The Rival Belles; or, Life in Washington, T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1878 [1st Pub. 1852].
• Adventures of Col. Gracchus Vanderbomb, of Sloughcreek, in Pursuit of the Presidency: Also the Exploits of Mr. Numberius Plutarch Kipps, his Private Secretary, A. Hart, 1852.
• Freaks of Fortune; or, The History and Adventures of Ned Lorn, T. B. Peterson, 1854.
• The Monarchist: An Historical Novel Embracing Real Characters and Romantic Adventures, A. Hart, 1853.
• The Winkles; or, The Merry Monomaniacs. An American Picture with Portraits of the Natives, 1855.
• Wild Western Scenes-Second Series. The Warpath: A Narrative of Adventures in the Wilderness, J. B. Lippincott, 1856.
• Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant : A Narrative of his Exploits at Home, During his Travels, and in the Cities, Designed to Amuse and Instruct, J. B. Lippincott, 1857.
• Wild Southern Scenes. A Tale of Disunion! and Border War!, T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1859.
• Secession, Coercion, and Civil War. The Story of 1861, T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1861.
• Wild Western Scenes; or, The White Spirit of the Wilderness. Being a Narrative of Adventures, Embracing the Same Characters Portrayed in the Original “Wild Western Scenes.” New Series, 1863.
• Love and Money, T.B. Peterson, 1865.
• Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of his Exploits at Home, During his Travels, and in the Cities, J. B. Lippincott, 1875.

Diary

• A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Vol. 2, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1866.