Augusta Evans Wilson (1835-1909) was born in Columbus, Georgia. When she was a young girl, she moved with her parents by covered wagon to San Antonio, Texas. At the age of fifteen, when she was living in Mobile, Alabama, she wrote her first book, Inez, A Tale of the Alamo. Three years later she wrote Beulah, which sold over 22,000 copies, making her Alabama's first professional author.
St. Elmo, for which yours truly was named, was her most famous novel. Many things-cigars, hotels, steamboats, and towns-were named for it. Critics, however, did not appreciate the Victorian verbiage, thought the heroine had 'swallowed an unabridged dictionary.' As it turned out, the reading public went ballistics over the overdrawn heroes and heroines, the unbelievable marriage proposals, and, in general, the Victorian world she had created. St. Elmo would, in time, be rewritten as a stage performance and as a movie. It was undoubtedly one of the bestsellers of the Nineteenth Century.

Another successful novel of hers was Macaria and Vashti.