Emma Speed Sampson

The Comings of Cousin Ann Emma Speed Sampson

Emma Speed Sampson, (December 1, 1868 - May 7, 1947) was an American author of juvenile fiction. Sampson was born on a farm near Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother was Emma Frances Speed who was the daughter of George Keats. She studied art at the Art Students League in New York City. She returned to Louisville where she started teaching. She married Henry Aylett Sampson in 1896. Together they raised two daughters. She and her husband and her sister, Nell Speed, moved to Richmond, Virginia which remained her permanent home. Nell, who was a writer of a series of juvenile books featuring a young woman called Molly Brown, was ill with cancer so she convinced her sister to continue the series after her death. Sampson continued the series for another three books (Nell wrote the first four) and published them using her sister's name. She wrote several more books using the pseudonym Nell Speed when she switched publishers and began writing under her own name. She wrote a sequel to a book written by another author, Frances Boyd Calhoun. The book was called Billy and the Major. She also continued the "Mary Louise" series started by L. Frank Baum. Sampson served on the Virginia board of motion picture censors and was a writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. She died in 1947 at the age of 78.