David Fulton Karsner was born on March 13, 1889, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Cecil J. and Annetta Karsner. His father was appointed general appraiser of the Port of Baltimore by President Benjamin Harrison around a year after Karsner's birth.
As a young boy, Karsner lived in a Baltimore orphanage and attended a school for underprivileged boys. He began his newspaper career at the age of seventeen, covering the stock yards of Chicago, where he befriended notable writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sherwood Anderson, and Clarence Darrow.
Karsner went on to work for various newspapers, including the New York Tribune, The Philadelphia Ledger, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and the socialist paper, the New York Call. He also wrote a column on the demise of American Socialism in the form of an obituary.
David Karsner is best remembered for his work as a biographer. His bestseller, "Silver Dollar" (1932),told the story of Horace Austin Warner Tabor, who made a fortune in silver but was ruined by gold. He also wrote biographies on Horace Traubel, Eugene V. Debs, and John Brown.
In 1911, Karsner married Rose Greenberg, a socialist Rumanian émigré. After their divorce, he married Esther Eberson in 1922. Esther later illustrated his book "Andrew Jackson the Gentle Savage" and assisted him as a proofreader.
David Karsner died on February 20, 1941, at the Downtown Hospital in New York after suffering a heart attack. He was survived by his wife Esther and their daughter Walta Karsner Ross.
