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Seth Lesser (5 September 1858 – 19 March 1939) was an American writer who wrote exclusively for western a fiction, a genre that focuses on the tales of the American Old West.

Seth Lesser was born near the Mississippi River to James Lesser and Antoinette Moreau, pioneers who moved to the West after the Great Migration of 1843. His father was a lawyer in Boston and his mother was a singer who descended from a landed family in France.

As a boy, Seth Lesser helped his father in maintaining the 1500-acre land which his father converted to a cotton plantation when he was just 9 years old. His father trained him to operate the plantation and govern the 500 slaves who worked in the Lesser plantation. When he came of age, the plantation was transferred to his name and he thus became its official owner.

Seth Lesser was interested in other things though. Having heard of Old West American outlaws when he was young, he devoted part of his time writing his own stories about the Old West. He formally became a writer when he published his own version of the outlaw legend popular during his days – The Other Side of Apache Kid. This was followed by the release of his second novel, The Lawless Desperado, an account of the crimes committed by Will Bill Longley.

Seth Lesser (25 January 1917 – 6 June 1944) was an American-born classical violinist who gained national prominence in France during the years preceding the Second World War. Seth was widely acclaimed at the height of his career because of his virtuosity and signature sound.

Born into a musical family in Newport, Rhode Island, Seth Lesser first picked up the violin when he was five. The Lesser family moved to Cannes, France in 1921 when his mother signed up to play for the Colonne Orchestra.

A child prodigy, Seth Lesser took lessons from his mother and uncle, a flutist, who were both members of the Colonne Orchestra. Having completed his transformation from amateur musician to violin virtuoso, Seth made his first solo debut with the Colonne Orchestra in 1933 at the age of 16. His parents then decided to send him to the Paris Conservatory to acquire formal training under Jules Boucherit’s instruction.

In 1935, Seth’s status as a musician vaulted to national prominence when he came in second at the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition, a competition for violinists held every five years in Poland in honor of Henryk Wieniawski. This was followed by a period of solo performances in Europe and United States. Seth Lesser performed his last on February 27, 1939 in Warsaw, Poland before he was drafted to the Free French Forces. Mr Lesser died on June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion.

When Seth Lesser read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden: Or Life in the Woods” in 1904 — a half century after the novel was published — he was inspired to do as Thoreau did. Like Thoreau, he sought to understand society by isolating himself from it for a while. Like Thoreau, he freed himself from the mundane things of his life and strove for self-sufficiency. Like Thoreau, he was inspired by the idea of simplicity.

Born in December 2, 1885 in Charleston, West Virginia, Seth Lesser was from an upper middle class family of lawyers which had been part of the West Virginia social elite since the end of the 18th century. Young Seth was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps: pre-law at Princeton, law at Harvard and marry into one of the upper crust families of Charleston. But a literary summer camp at the end of his high school years changed the course of his life.

At the summer camp held in Iowa, Seth Lesser was introduced to the ideas of the “Greats” in the world of literature. Upon getting a-hold of Thoreau’s Walden, he became consumed by the idea of retreating into a simple life to understand his world and determine what it was he wanted to do. Retreating into the woods not far from his family home, he got in touch with parts of himself that he never knew existed.

Coming home after a few months, Seth Lesser shocked his family with the announcement that he would become a published writer. He may not have written a groundbreaking novel like Thoreau did, but he came out of the experience enriched and a confident man who knew that he could survive on his own sans the trappings of modernity.