Edgar Wallace autograph 1901

Edgar Wallace Autograph 1901

Boer War interest, the letter makes reference to Emily Hobhouse and the concentration camps.

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1 April 1875 – 10 February 1932) was a British writer of crime and adventure fiction.

Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail.

Wallace began publishing songs and poetry, much inspired by Rudyard Kipling, whom he met in Cape Town in 1898. Wallace's first book of ballads, The Mission that Failed!, was published that same year. In 1899, he bought his way out of the forces and turned to writing full time. Remaining in Africa, he became a war correspondent, first for Reuters and then the Daily Mail (1900) and other periodicals during the Boer War.

In 1901, while in South Africa, Wallace married Ivy Maude Caldecott (1879–1926), even though her father Reverend William Shaw Caldecott, a Wesleyan missionary, was strongly opposed to the marriage.

In addition to his work on King Kong, he is remembered as a writer of "the colonial imagination", for the J. G. Reeder detective stories, and for the Green Archer serial. He sold over 50 million copies of his combined works in various editions and The Economist in 1997 describes him as "one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the 20th] century". Although the great majority of his books are out of print in the UK, they are still read in Germany. A 50-minute German TV documentary was made in 1963 called The Edgar Wallace Story, which featured his son Bryan Edgar Wallace.

204mm x 255mm

See also Militaria
R20,000

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