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Authors of Ekkoes From Kentucky

Known best by his pseudonym of Petroleum V. Nasby, David Ross Locke was born in upstate New York near Binghamton to a poor family. According to his biographer, John Harrison, Locke had "little formal education." (5) Instead, Locke built his career off his own hard work and ingenuity, starting from a very young age. When he was 12, Locke became an apprentice at a Cortland newspaper called the Democrat, a position that lasted for seven years.

Born in Bavaria in 1840, Nast emigrated to New York City with his mother and sister in 1846 and his father followed them in 1850. Nast’s early artistic influences were historical painter Theodore Kaufmann, with whom he began his first formal study; Alfred Fredericks, whose studio was nearby and who became a mentor to Nash and helped him gain entry to the Academy of Design, as well as Frank Leslie, the publisher of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper who hired the sixteen-year old Nast for five dollars a week.