 Published in the fall of 1898, some six months after the author's death, it sold an impressive 400,000 copies during the following year.Although the book contains the mandatory love story, the character and philosophy of the title character, small town banker and horse trader David Harum, expressed in the dialect of 19th-century rural central New York is the focus of the book.The main appeal of the work seems to have been to businessmen, attracted by its approval of a much more relaxed code of business ethics than was presented in most novels of the time.