The American Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) wrote quite popular travel books, especially those about Polynesia. South-Sea Idyls (1873) was his most popular book. A series of letters to a friend, "They are," wrote William Dean Howells, "the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that were ever written about the life of that summer ocean." Stoddard also wrote The Lepers Of Molokai (1885), a book that brought Father Damien and his charges to public notice.