David Fulton Karsner was born on 13 March, 1889, at Baltimore Maryland, the son of Cecil J. and Annetta Karsner. About a year after Karsner's birth, President Benjamin Harrison appointed his father general appraiser of the Port of Baltimore. By the end of the nineteenth century, Karsner would be living in a Baltimore orphanage and attending a school for underprivileged boys.

Karsner began his newspaper career at the age of seventeen covering the stock yards of Chicago. There he met and became friends with Sinclair Lewis, who was doing research for his book "The Jungle". While at Chicago he also became acquainted with Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sherwood Anderson and Clarence Darrow. Karsner later worked on the New York Tribune, The Philadelphia Ledger, the New York Daily News, the New York Post and the socialist paper, the New York Call. He also wrote a column on the demise of American Socialism in the form of an obituary.

David Karsner is best remembered as a writer of biographies. His best seller, "Silver Dollar" (1932), told the story of Horace Austin Warner Tabor (1830-1899), who made a fortune in silver and was ruined by gold. Karsner also wrote, "Horace Traubel: His Life and Work" (1919), "Debs; his authorized life and letters from Woodstock prison to Atlanta" (1919), "Talks With Debs In Terre Haute. (And Letters from Lindlahr)" (1922) "Sixteen Authors to One: Intimate Sketches of Leading American Storytellers" (1928), "Andrew Jackson the Gentle Savage" (1929) and "John Brown: Terrible Saint" (1934),

While Horace Traubel (1858-1919) was in Canada attending a dedication of a huge granite cliff that was to be named "Old Walt" in honor of Walt Whitman, he wrote Karsner in New York: "Here safe. Tired. Hopeful. . . Tired still. Damned tired. God damned tired." Traubel, who had not been well, passed away a few days later.

In 1911 Karsner married socialist Rumanian émigré, Rose Greenberg (1889-1968). After the Russian Revolution she became active in the communist movement and later married James P. Cannon, national chairman of the American Socialist Workers party. Five months after his first marriage ended, Karsner married Esther Eberson (1890-1982) on 5 May, 1922, at Newark, New Jersey. Esther later illustrated Karsner's "Andrew Jackson the Gentle Savage" with four pen drawings and assisted him as a proofreader.

David Fulton Karsner died on 20 February, 1941, at the Downtown Hospital in New York after suffering a heart attack. He was survived by his wife Esther and Walta Karsner Ross (1914-2000), a daughter from his first marriage. Shortly before his death he told some newspaper friends, who were visiting him at the hospital, that if they didn't see him again to remind the copy clerk that the name, David Karsner, "just fits into a Number 4 head". The next day the New York Post ran his obituary with a Number 4 headline.

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David Karsner

Writer