Thomas Mayne Reid

Thomas Mayne Reid
Thomas Mayne Reid, c. 1850
Thomas Mayne Reid, c. 1850
Born4 April 1818 (1818-04-04)
Ballyroney, County Down, Ireland
Died22 October 1883 (1883-10-23) (aged 65)
London, England
OccupationNovelist
GenreAdventure
Literary movementRomanticism/Neo-romanticism
Signature
Mr. and Mrs. Mayne Reid

Thomas Mayne Reid (4 April 1818 – 22 October 1883) was a 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 and Robert Louis Stevenson. 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 turned almost completely forgotten in the Anglosphere, they have remained popular in Eastern Europe and particularly in Russia (ever since the Tsarist period), being considered a part of Western literature canon and published under the category of "World Classics" (along with Jack London and Fenimore Cooper).[1]