Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There is an 1854 novel written by American author Timothy Shay Arthur . The book is a temperance novel, written expressly to discourage readers from drinking alcohol. It was a commercial and popular success upon its release and was later adapted into other media. Timothy Shay Arthur (June 6, 1809 – March 6, 1885) — known as T. S. Arthur — was a popular 19th-century American author. He is famously known for his temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854), which helped demonize alcohol in the eyes of the American public. His stories, written with compassion and sensitivity, articulated and spread values and ideas that were associated with “respectable middle class“ life in America. He also believed greatly in the transformative and restorative power of love as is shown in one of his stories, "An Angel in Disguise". He was also the author of dozens of stories for Godey's Lady's Book, the most popular American monthly magazine in the antebellum era, and he published and edited his own Arthur's Home Magazine, a periodical in the Godey's model, for many years. Virtually forgotten now, Arthur did much to articulate and disseminate the values, beliefs, and habits that defined respectable, decorous middle-class life in America.