After many discouragements, the author of David Harum lived long enough to know that his book had found appreciation and was to be published, but he died before it appeared.
Edward Noyes Westcott, the son of Dr. Amos Westcott, a prominent physician of Syracuse, and at one time mayor of the city, was born September 27, 1846. Nearly all his life was passed in his native city of Syracuse. His active career began early at a bank clerk's desk, and he was afterward teller and cashier, then head of the firm of Westcott & Abbott, bankers and brokers, and in his later years he acted as the registrar and financial expert of the Syracuse Water Commission. His artistic temperament found expression only in music until the last years of his life. He wrote articles occasionally upon financial subjects, but it was not until the approach of his last illness that he began David Harum. No character in this book is taken directly from life. Stories which his father had told and his own keen observations and lively imagination furnished his material, but neither David Harum nor any other character is a copy of any individual. No trace of the author's illness appears in the book. "I've had the fun of writing it, anyway," he wrote shortly before his death, "and no one will laugh over David more than I have. I never could tell what David was going to do next." This was the spirit of the brave and gentle author, who died March 31, 1898, unconscious of the fame which was to follow him.
R. H.
New York, August, 1900.
