Jonathan Baxter Harrison (April 5, 1835 – June 17, 1907), was a Unitarian minister and journalist who was involved in many of the social causes of his day: abolitionism, Indian rights, forest preservation, and the cultural improvement of the working class. Best known for his realistic depictions of everyday American life, he is acknowledged as an important influence in the development of literary realism. Life Born in a log cabin in Greene County, Ohio, he early showed an eagerness for reading, often studying beside the fire at night after a long day spent working in the fields. As a young man, he became a backwoods Methodist minister, and then worked for a Quaker-run abolitionist paper. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, he joined, with the rank of First Sergeant, the 8th Indiana Infantry Regiment, a regiment of volunteers formed for a three-month period of service; the regiment fought at the Battle of Rich Mountain under the command of William Rosecrans. He spent the remaining war years as editor of the Winchester Journal in Randolph County, Indiana, where he began corresponding with Charles Eliot Norton, the secretary of the Loyal Publication Society, beginning a lifelong friendship. In Norton’s papers we see Harrison described as a figure much like Abraham Lincoln: an unaffected frontiersman, at once virtuous and wise. After the war, Harrison became a Unitarian minister and active in Spiritualism, a religious movement that attracted many abolitionists and other reformers. To be closer to Norton, Harrison moved east, obtaining a position as Unitarian minister 1870-1873 in Montclair, New Jersey, and then from 1879-1884 in Franklin Falls, New Hampshire, where he lived until his death. He made the acquaintance of members of Norton’s circle, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect and social critic, and William Dean Howells, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. At the encouragement of Norton and his friends, Harrison began writing on some of the most important social issues of the day. These included the conditions in the South after the end of Reconstruction; working class culture and political life in New England; the condition of the American Indians; and the deforestation of the Northeast. During the 1882 campaign to preserve the natural environment around Niagara Falls, Harrison wrote a series of letters to newspapers in Boston and New York that turned public opinion in favor of preservation. By 1889 he was a well-known figure