He was an editor of juvenile magazines, and through his work at Young Folks he met his future wife Marie Connor, a prolific author in her own right.
Young Folks accepted Treasure Island from Robert Louis Stevenson and ran it as a serial from 1881 to1882 while he was first assistant editor.
While he was at Young Folks, he met the tempestuous Marie Connor[note 1] (February 1866 – 28 January 1941), the adopted daughter of James Nenon Alexander Connor, formerly a captain in the 87th Foot, and the daughter of Elizabeth Ann Harris (1849 – 16 April 1908), a widow, born Trelawny.
[2]: 369 [8] Leighton began to produce books himself, starting with The Pilots of Pomona in 1892, but throughout the marriage, his wife's income from writing far exceeded his.
He was so deaf by the time his children were growing up, that he was able to write his adventure books sitting next to his wife while she dictated her next melodrama.
[6]: 39 Leighton produced four types of output: In a memoir,[16] Larry McMurtry (American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter) said Leighton's Sergeant Silk: the prairie scout[17] (about a fictional member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), was one of the first books McMurtry ever read.
[18] The following illustrations by Alfred Pearse (1856–1933) for The Thirsty Sword – a story of the Norse invasion of Scotland (1262–1263) give an idea of the pacing of Leighton's writing in a novel which was meant to teach history as well as entertain.
The columns PG, IA, HT, and BL indicate if online texts are available at: While still set in a historical tale, The Golden Galleon was more of an adventure story than a history lesson.