<p>Altsheler was born in Three Springs, Hart County, Kentucky to Joseph and Louise (Snoddy) Altsheler. In 1885, he took a job at the Louisville Courier-Journal as a reporter and later worked as an editor. He started working for the New York World in 1892, first as the paper's Hawaiian correspondent and then as the editor of the World's tri-weekly magazine. Due to a lack of suitable stories, he began writing children's stories for t...