Frederic Dorr Steele (August 6, 1873 – July 6, 1944) was an American illustrator best known for his work on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

He made his first attempt at color illustration for Mary Catherine Lee's story "The Wheel of Time", which appeared in the November 1900 issue of Scribner's Magazine.

According to Hoeber's article, Steele used various media to produce art but preferred crayon, which for him was the most immediately expressive medium.

[8] Steele provided illustrations for various novels such as Richard Harding Davis's The Scarlet Car (1907),[9] E. W. Hornung's The Crime Doctor (1914), and Geraldine Bonner's The Black Eagle Mystery (1916).

[10] His career as a magazine illustrator declined with the coming of the Great Depression, and he turned to newspapers, particularly the New York Herald-Tribune.

[12] For Collier's Weekly in 1903, Steele was invited to do the illustrations for The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

[15] Steele's illustrations for the thirteen stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes were made in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Steele wrote an essay titled "Sherlock Holmes: A Little History of the World's Most Famous Fictional Character" for a souvenir program for the play dated November 22, 1929.

[18] Steele illustrated a Sherlock Holmes parody by Carolyn Wells titled "The Adventure of the Clothes-line", which was published in The Century Magazine in May 1915.

[22] Vincent Starrett dedicated his 1933 book The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes to Steele and two other people including William Gillette.

In the book, Starrett praised Steele's illustrations of the Holmes stories, stating that "No happier association of author and artist can be imagined".

[24] Steele married Mary ("Polly") Thyng in 1898, and for much of the time until 1912 they lived at Nutley, New Jersey, then returning to New York.

[26] His children donated a large collection of manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and other materials relating to Steele's life and career to the University of Minnesota Libraries in 1986.