Austin was born in 1778 in
Lunenburg, Massachusetts, where his family had fled after the British burned down their house in
Charlestown during the
Battle of Bunker Hill. He was educated at
Harvard College and
Lincoln's Inn, London. He married twice, fought one duel with pistols, and had fourteen children, including
Arthur W. Austin and
James W. Austin. As a young man he served as Unitarian chaplain aboard the
USS Constitution from about March 1, 1799. He resigned about August 27, 1800. After the
Constitution captured a French ship, the salvage proceedings brought Austin $200 and the acquaintance of
Alexander Hamilton, who helped the young man begin his legal studies in London. While studying at
Lincoln's Inn, Austin produced a lively series of "Letters from London", describing the politics and personalities during the age of
Pitt and Fox. Back in America, Austin was active in local politics in the Boston area, serving in the state senate as a representative of Middlesex during the early 1820s. Although he was a frequent contributor to local periodicals on subjects ranging from Unitarian theology to chemistry to legal history, nothing else he wrote had the popularity of
Peter Rugg: The Missing Man (1824) and its sequels. In 1882, his son, James Walker Austin, gathered the three Peter Rugg stories into a single volume. In 1925, Austin's grandson Walter Austin reissued the Rugg tales, this time with a biographical sketch, in the volume
William Austin: the Creator of Peter Rugg. ==Influence==