Francis Rolt-Wheeler 
Wonder of War on Land 

Francis Rolt-Wheeler (1876 – 1960) was born Francis William Wheeler in Forest Hills, England. He lived with his family, in England, until some time before 1901. He crossed the Atlantic where he became a naturalised US citizen in 1903, working as a journalist. Starting around 1906, Wheeler made a name for himself — as Francis Rolt-Wheeler — as a writer of books, mostly for boys, like The Boy with the United States Survey and The Boy with the US Trappers. He also published a 10 volume Science-History of the Universe, books for children with topics ranging from Aztecs to dinosaurs to Thomas Alva Edison, a series of books on aspects of the first world war, and some poetry and drama. Francis Rolt-Wheeler remained in the US until the late 1920, and his reputation as a writer of popular boy’s material continued to wax through the 1920s. He was traveling globally quite a bit during this period and left the US for the Middle East, where he began his second career as an occultist. The Rolt-Wheeler handle was used by both Francis and his sister Ethel, a poet, writer, reincarnationist and Fellow of the Theosophical Society.