American journalist, humorist, novelist, and lecturer. Read specialized in the homespun humour of life in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas; Southern colonels, blacks, and drunken printers are frequently found in his writing.

Inspired by Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, Read became a printer, reporter, and editor, ultimately editing the Little Rock, Ark., Gazette (1878–81) and the Arkansas Traveler (1882), a weekly humour and literary journal, which he moved to Chicago in 1887. His books included Len Gansett (1888), a tale of the South; Jucklins (1895), which sold more than 1,000,000 copies; My Young Masters (1896), about the American Civil War; and many others. His autobiography, I Remember, was published in 1930.