George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928) was an American popular novelist and playwright, best known for Brewster's Millions and a series of novels set in Graustark, a fictional East European country. West Wind Drift is another name for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. McCutcheon's novel tells the story a great modern liner shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, where the passengers build homes, establish a government and laws, and keep "the fires of courage burning through the years that follow."