Chicago lawyer and author.

Joseph Kirkland was born in Geneva, New York in 1830 and lived mostly in the East until he entered private business in Illinois in 1856. He first worked as an auditor for the Illinois Central Railway, then a supervisor of mining operations for a coal company. During the Civil War he was aide-de-camp to Generals George McClellan and Fitz-John Porter, and afterwards he tried establishing a coal-mining enterprise before becoming an agent for the Internal Revenue Service. Finally, in 1880 at age fifty, he was admitted to the Illinois bar and practiced law for the next ten years. However, what he really wanted was to become a serious author, which meant his writing career came rather late in life.

Kirkland had been developing his literary talent by experimenting with playwriting and writing book reviews for the Chicago Dial. During the 1870's and 1880's he had poems, articles and stories published in various Chicago newspapers and periodicals, but his literary reputation, albeit a modest one, rests on the publication of the first of his three novels, Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County (1887). The book, based on his own experiences and his keen ear for Midwestern speech and character, received good reviews and sold well, though the following two novels, The McVeys in 1888 and The Captain of Company K in 1889 were not as accomplished. Because of Zury Kirkland has been credited as a pioneering realist, the first to present a truthful portrayal of Midwestern farm life, and apparently the novel inspired both Stephen Crane and Hamlin Garland.

In 1889 Kirkland was the literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, which two years later printed his series of letters from Nicaragua where he had gone as a special correspondent, and he continued to be published in Century, Scribner's and Atlantic. His last works were local histories, The Story of Chicago (1891) and The Chicago Massacre of 1812 (1893).

Joseph Kirkland married Theodosia B. Wilkinson and they had four children. He died in Chicago of a heart attack in 1894.