Ellsworth Douglass was an American writer about whom little public information is available; details of his life, such as his birth and death years, education, and writing career, have not been clearly recorded. One work by him is held in the collection, the early science fiction novel Pharaoh's Broker. Judging from this surviving work, Douglass wrote in the science fiction genre, and his writing shows imaginative narrative features common to early science fiction. Works of this kind often develop their plots through fictional scientific or commercial premises, reflecting the exploratory character of science fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the genre had fully taken shape. Because both surviving works and research materials are quite scarce, his place in the history of science fiction is difficult to determine with certainty. Nevertheless, Pharaoh's Broker, as his representative work, can still serve as a sample for understanding the diversity of early English-language science fiction and may be of reference to readers and researchers.
