Ann Sophia Stephens was born on March 30, 1810 in Derby, Connecticut, she was the daughter of Ann and John Winterbotham, son of William Winterbotham. Her mother died early and she was brought up by her mother"s sister, who eventually became her stepmother.
She was educated at a dame school in South Britain, Connecticut and started writing at an early age.
She was the author of dime novels and is credited as the progenitor of that genre. He was the manager of a woolen mill owned by Colonel David Humphreys. The magazine was sold in 1837.
They moved to New York where Ann took the job of editor to The Ladies Companion and where she could further her literary work.
This was also the time she adopted the humorous pseudonym Jonathan Slick. Over the next few years she wrote over twenty-five serial novels plus short stories and poems for several well known periodicals which included Godey"s Lady"s Book and Graham"s Magazine.
Her first novel Fashion and famine was published in 1854. The magazine merged with Peterson"s Magazine a few years later.
The term "dime novel" originated with Stephens"s Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, printed in the first book in Beadle & Adams"s Beadle’s Dime Novels series, dated June 9, 1860.
The novel was a reprint of Stephens"s earlier serial that appeared in the Ladies" Companion magazine in February, March, and April 1839. Later, the Grolier Club listed Malaeska as the most influential book of 1860. Some of her other work includes High Life in New York (1843), Alice Copley: A Tale of Queen Mary"s Time (1844), The Diamond Necklace and Other Tale (1846), The Old Homestead (1855), The Rejected Wife (1863) and A Noble Woman (1871).
