Ruel Perley Smith

Who was Ruel Perley Smith?

Ruel Perley Smith was a novelist and newspaper editor best known for the Rival Camper series of boy's books published by L.C. Page & Co. of Boston in the first decade of the 20th century. Born in Bangor, Maine, Smith made his career as a newspaper reporter in New York, eventually becoming Night City Editor of the New York World in the 1920s.

The Rival Camper series of boy's books were set in Smith's native Maine. They included The Rival Campers, or, The Adventures of Henry Burns; The Rival Campers Afloat, or, The Prize Yacht Viking; The Rival Campers Ashore, or, The Mystery of the Mill; and Jack Harvey's Adventures, or, The Rival Campers Among the Oyster Pirates. The series ceased by the second decade of the twentieth century. When Smith again tried his hand at a novel, in the early 1920s, it was aimed at an adult audience. Prisoners of Fortune: A Tale of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was actually a pirate story with Massachusetts as only one location.

Smith was married to Ellen Cyr Smith, author of the widely used Cyr's Readers series for elementary school children. His sister Helena Wood Smith was a painter, and a member of the artists' colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where in 1914 she was murdered by her lover, the Japanese photographer George Kotani.