Augustus Comstock (Roger Starbuck)
BiographyAugustus Comstock (February 14, 1837–?) was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to William Comstock, a reporter and press writer in Brooklyn, New York, and his wife, Mary W. Davenport. Augustus was their third of six children. When fourteen years old he left school to set type in the Morning Star office. Subsequently he worked on the Atlas but was discharged for accidentally upsetting his case and making “pi.” He then studied law in the office of a relative but, disliking it, went to sea. Through the influence of his grandfather, Nathan Comstock, he secured a position on a whaler and made several voyages. After some years of the sea he returned to New York and began to write sea tales, his personal experience standing him in good stead. On the breaking out of the Civil War he enlisted as a private in Durvee's Zouaves, Fifth Regiment of New York Volunteers. While with his regiment he continued writing and several stories of army life appeared in the New York Weekly in 1861. At the second Battle of Bull Run, August 29, 1862, he received a severe wound which for a time incapacitated him, although he served with his regiment during its term.
After the war he lived in Brooklyn and devoted himself entirely to literature, writing serials and sketches for various story papers and dime novel publishers. He also wrote stories and poetry for Harper’s Weekly and other periodicals. All of Comstock’s stories were written under the pen name “Roger Starbuck,” although there is an unaccountable gap in his publications between 1875 and 1882 that hints at use of other pen names. His stories prior to 1875 were all sea tales; from 1882 on they were mostly Westerns.
He was married December 31, 1867, in Brooklyn. The Comstock genealogy gives the name of his wife as Mary Sypher in one place and as Mary E. Herbertson in another. They had one child, Clara, who was born in 1869 and died in 1900. Augustus was still living in 1906 or 1907, at Woodside, Long Island. He was described by Alfred Trumble as a tall, sinewy, square-shouldered man with a tanned leathery face and a “deliberate, reaching gait, like a man striding a deck,” who told a dry, humorous story in a slow way to whoever happened to be around.
Bibliography (wildly incomplete)
On the Deep; or, The Missionary’s Daughter: A Story of the Pacific Ocean (1870s)
Starbuck’s Book of Romance (1882)
Other links
Northern Illinois University Libraries
Wikipedia