Robert Montgomery Bird (February 5, 1806 – January 23, 1854) was an American novelist, playwright, and physician.

Following the death of his father when Bird was four years old, his mother and brothers moved to Philadelphia, but he was taken in by a rich uncle, Nicholas Van Dyke, in New Castle.

[3] Bird started to write commentary on Latin, American, and English literature, particularly the Elizabethan playwrights.

[3] In a small notebook labeled "Useful Works- if well prepared," Bird set his goal to write nine biographies, thirty volumes of miscellaneous studies, three volumes of tales, some select novels of Boccaccio, the Arabian nights, eleven tragedies, twelve comedies, thirty three melodramas, and twenty-five novels.

[2] These include Calavar (1834), The Infidel (1835), The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow (1835), Sheppard Lee (1836), Nick of the Woods (1837) (his most successful novel), and The Adventures of Robin Day (1839).

In an 877-page study of American literature from the Revolutionary War through 1940, scholar Alexander Cowie found The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow second only to Logan by John Neal (1822) in its level of incoherence.

[7] The five years from 1834 to 1839 were filled with too much activity: six novels and a part of a seventh, his marriage, the birth of his son, and his final bitter quarrel with Forrest.

According to Christopher Looby, "Bird's biographers say that the intensity of these literary labors led to a breakdown of his health, possibly including a mental disorder, and that he retired to a farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1840 to restore himself."

During this period he met Senator John M. Clayton, became interested in politics, was a delegate to the Whig Convention in Baltimore in 1844, and in 1848 wrote a campaign biography of General Zachary Taylor.