Herman Whitaker (1867 to 1919) was an English-born American novelist and short story writer. He was born Herman James Whitaker on January 14, 1867, in Huddersfield, England. He emigrated to North America as a young man and worked at a variety of jobs and in several places before he settled into writing. His time in southern Mexico, particularly the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, gave him the material for his best-known novel, The Planter, published in 1909. He returned to the frontier and to Mexico in other books. These included The Settler (1906), Over the Border: A Novel of Northern Mexico (1916), and the story "The Mystery of the Barranca" (1913). He is credited with roughly two hundred short stories for magazines of his day, and his adventure fiction drew on the people and landscapes of the Americas. John Ford's 1926 silent western 3 Bad Men was adapted from Over the Border. Whitaker was also an active socialist and a part of the Progressive movement in California. He lived in Berkeley, where Jack London counted him among the writers he admired. He died on January 20, 1919, in New York City, reportedly of stomach cancer. His ashes were scattered on Round Top, an extinct volcano in the Berkeley Hills.
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