Bart Stirling's Road to Success or The Young Express Agent — Opie Read

According to Wikipedia: Opie Percival Read (b. December 22, 1852, Nashville Tennessee; d. November 2, 1939, Chicago Illinois) was a prolific American journalist and humorist. ... In 1882, Read founded his own humor magazine, the Arkansas Traveler, which he carried on after leaving newspaper journalism in 1887. Read brought the Arkansas Traveler, a flowing pen, and a command of Southern dialect to Chicago in 1887. He would spend the remainder of his life in the Northern city. Read's bibliography shows that in his first 20 full years in Chicago (1888-1908) he published 54 separate books, of which 31 were novels, 18 were book-length compilations of short fiction such as that published in the Arkansas Traveler, and five were works of non-fiction.