Rodney the Partisan

Charles Austin Fosdick (1842-1915), better known by his nom de plume Harry Castlemon, was a prolific writer of juvenile stories and novels, intended mainly for boys. He served in the Union Navy from 1862 to 1865, during the American Civil War, acting as the receiver and superintendent of coal for the Mississippi River Squadron. Fosdick had begun to write as a teenager, and drew on his experiences serving in the Navy in such early novels as Frank on a Gunboat (1864) and Frank on the Lower Mississippi (1867). He soon became the mostread author for boys in the post-Civil War era, the golden age of children's literature. Fosdick served up a lot of adventure in such popular book series as the Gunboat series, the Rocky Mountain series, the Roughing it series and the Sportsman's Club series. He was "Uncle Charlie" to famed liberal Baptist minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, whose writings reflected fondly on the time spent as a boy visiting Fosdick at his home in Westfield, New York.