Ralph Henry Barbour

Ralph Henry Barbour (1870–1944) was an American author of books for boys, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who worked as a journalist in Denver and Philadelphia before The Half-Back (1899) found him his lifelong subject: football, baseball, rowing and track at American boarding schools, with new boys who make the team and learn fair play on the way. He produced more than 150 books, many of them in long series, and his school stories were the standard gift for boys for forty years. He also wrote light romances for adults and books on home building. His plots are gentle, but his detail about how the games were actually played is exact.