Background
Daniel Willard Fiske was born in Ellisburg, New York was the son of Daniel Haven and Caroline (Willard) Fiske, and traced his descent from Nathan Fiske, who was in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1642. Of his parents he himself wrote in 1857: “My father is from the most undoubted Puritan stock of Massachusetts, and was born there. . My mother is from Vermont, and among the hills of this latter state I spent some of the pleasantest hours of my boyhood. ”
Beyond the Bourne (1891) is a spiritualist story. Though he published The Story of the Philippines in 1898, and The West Indies in 1899, his interest during the last several decades of his life was divided chiefly between economic subjects and subjects having to do with Hebrew folklore. In Jewish Scriptures (1896), The Myths of Israel (1897), and The Great Epic of Israel (1911), he assumes that the Old Testament is not the “specially inspired word of God” (Great Epic, p. 4), but he exhibits great admiration for it not only as a curious document but as a source of beauty and wisdom ; and he is avowedly bent on encouraging in his day an acquaintance with the Bible. The Modern Bank (1904) is almost entirely descriptive, but Honest Business ( 1914) is an entertaining, non-technical record of the author s conclusions about the economic structure of society—feelings conservative in general, but controlled always by an instinct for fairness.
For the last year and a half of his life he was in delicate health, living in Cambridge at the home of his two daughters.