Son of a clergyman, Proudfit was educated at the common schools until the onset of the Civil War.
Enlisting as a private in the 1st Regiment New York Mounted Rifles aged nineteen, he spent four years as a soldier, rising to the rank of major.
He began contributing to periodicals under the pseudonym Peleg Arkwright, until success encouraged him to write under his own name.
[2] His later business interests included pneumatic tubes; in the 1880s he was president of the Meteor despatch company of New York.
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