Crowe, Eyre Evans (1799–1868), journalist, fiction writer, and historian, was born 20 March 1799, at Redbridge, near Southampton, of Anglo-Irish parents. His father, David Miles Crowe, was a captain in an East India regiment; his mother died shortly after his birth. He was educated in Carlow and at TCD, but left before taking his degree in order to pursue a career in journalism. He published The pleasures of melancholy, and a Saxon tale (1819), and contributed to the Dublin Magazine and the Irish Monthly Register. He next worked briefly in London before an extended sojourn in Italy, where he wrote descriptive articles for Blackwood's Magazine (1822–3). He returned to London, where in 1823 he married Margaret Archer of Kiltimon, Co. Wicklow (d. 1853), with whom he had four sons and two daughters, including Eyre Crowe (1824–1910), painter and secretary to William Makepeace Thackeray.
Often described as a benevolent tory, Crowe was a trenchant critic of the ascendancy, as was apparent in the two influential fictional works he published anonymously on Irish subjects: To-day in Ireland (1825), a portrait of agrarian violence, and Yesterday in Ireland (1829), which dealt with the 1798 rebellion. He also published the novel Vittoria Colonna (1825), and several short-story collections: The English in Italy (1825), The English in France (1828), and The English at home (1830). In the 1830s he devoted his energies to history and journalism. He was Paris correspondent for the Morning Chronicle (1832–44) and contributed A history of France to Dionysius Lardner's (qv) Cabinet Encyclopaedia (1830); he later published an expanded version of this work (5 vols, 1858–68), and a History of the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X (1854).
In 1844 he returned to England and concentrated on journalism, joining the staff of the liberal Daily News (reportedly at the invitation of Charles Dickens) as a writer on parliamentary affairs. He later edited this paper (1849–51), after which he wrote foreign articles for The Examiner. After making a trip to the Levant, he published The Greek and the Turk, or, Powers and prospects in the Levant (1853), in the same year as a novel, Charles Delmer. He died 25 February 1868 at 56 Beaumont Street, London, and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery.