He was the son of Joseph Rogers Wilson, for 25 years principal of the old Portland Academy. He was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1877, and so was 28 when he sold his first story to Joe Levinson. He died at 45 but during those seventeen years he embraced literature with enough energy so that he left $90,000 in earnings from his books and stories. That money, with the Saturday Evening Post pattern and other patterns required in its making, is one reason why his work has not survived. He is mostly remembered now in Oregon because thousands have read in school his Yaquina Bay juvenile book, Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout.
He attended Parsons College, Iowa, and transferred to Princeton, where he was graduated in 1900. He went to sea and taught school during the next two years. Then for three years he did newspaper work in Portland, going to San Francisco in 1906 to edit the Argonaut. He returned to Portland to become editor for a while of the Pacific Monthly. In 1907 he married a stenographer in the offices of the magazine—Lulu Burt, who had come to Portland from Lincoln County, where, soon after their marriage, they went to live. While their home was at Newport he secured background for The Land Claimers, a novel of the Siletz country; and for Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout, and Tad Sheldon’s Fourth of July, two collections of boy stories of Yaquina Bay. He spent the winter of 1910 at Long Beach, Washington, working on his manuscripts. He then went to San Francisco and later to New York, settling on a small farm that he owned near the city.
