Hallie Erminie Rives (May 2, 1874 – August 16, 1956) was a best-selling popular novelist and wife of the American diplomat Post Wheeler.

An author's biography in one of her books notes that her father, who had fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and spent two years in a Northern prison camp, had "made her his little comrade" when she was a child and she was an excellent rifle shot and a bareback rider who was called "the Rives' little wildcat" by outsiders.

In her novels she addressed politics between the Northern and Southern United States, issues of race, and sex, causing great debate among critics.

The novel is about an African American man accused of raping and murdering a white woman who was lynched after the governor commuted his sentence to life.

Her widower died on Christmas Eve, December 23, 1956, at the Frances Convalescent Home in Neptune, New Jersey, just 4 months later.