Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-1866) was an American novelist, best known for her best-selling 1854 novel, The Lamplighter. The Lamplighter was Cummins first novel and it was only out-sold at the time by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. James D. Hart (author of The Oxford Companion to American Literature) noted that The Lamplighter could provide insight into the American culture of its time: "If a student of taste wants to know the thoughts and feelings of the majority who lived during Franklin Pierce's administration, he will find more positive value in Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter or T. S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Bar-Room than he will in Thoreau's Walden - all books published in 1854." Cummin's heroine Gerty Flint inspired James Joyce's character Gerty McDowell in a portion of Ulysses generally believed to be a parody of Cummins' writing style.