Born Edwin Lester Linden Arnold (14 May 1857 - 1 March 1935) he was born in Swanscombe, Kent, as the son of Sir Edwin Arnold, a renowned orientalist, and journalist. Edwin Lester spent most of his childhood in India but returned to England to study agriculture and ornithology. He became a journalist (1883), and between 1877 and 1887 he published his first non-fiction books: A Holiday in Scandinavia (1877) and Bird Life in England (1887). His first novel The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician was initially serialized in the Illustrated London News and, later on, collected as a book in the U.S. and U. K. His following novels, Rutherford the Twice-born (1892), The Constable of Saint Nicholas (1894), The Story of Ulla and other Tales (1895), and Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of Today (1901), mostly flopped commercially. Probably the late 19th Century readers did not appreciate Edwin Lester's witty and ironic style. He made one last attempt at writing fiction with the today famous Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905). The initial reception of the book was tepid and led Edwin Lester to stop writing until his dead in 1935.