David Harum: A Story of American Life was a best-selling novel of 1899 whose principal legacy is the colloquial use of the term horse trading. Written by retired Syracuse, New York banker, Edward Noyes Westcott, the work was rejected by six publishers before being accepted for publication by D. Appleton & Company. Published in the fall of 1898 - some 6 months after the author's death - it sold an impressive 400,000 copies during the following year. Although the book contains the mandatory love story, the character and philosophy of the title character, small town banker and horse trader David Harum, expressed in the dialect of 19th-century rural central New York is the focus of the book.