Benjamin Wolf was born on February 16, 1836, in London, England, the first of ten children raised by Edward and Sarah Woolf.

In 1894 he left the Gazette to take charge of the music desk at the Boston Herald, a position Woolf held for the remainder of his life.

The idea of the play, originally titled The Almighty Dollar, came from Malvina Florence's humorous observations of wealthy Americans abroad.

[8] In 1894 Woolf collaborated with Richard Darwin Ware in Westward Ho, a comic opera about an English aristocrat posing as a Wild West gunslinger and a town in Wyoming run by women.

[11] Known on the stage as Josie Orton, she was for a number of years a leading actress at the Boston Museum, starring in plays such as Arrah-na-Pogue,[12] The Colleen Brawn,[13] and Rosadale.