Adams, Samuel Hopkins (26 January 1871–16 November 1958), muckraker and writer, was born in Dunkirk, New York, the son of Myron Adams, Jr., a minister, and Hester Rose Hopkins. He attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, from 1887 to 1891, with a semester at Union College. After graduation he was a devoted alumnus, serving as trustee (1905–1916), winning election to Phi Beta Kappa (1907), and receiving an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 1926....
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Adams, Samuel Hopkins (1871-1958), muckraker and writer
Samuel V. Kennedy
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Agee, James Rufus (1909-1955)
In
James Agee Photograph by Walker Evans, 1937. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-103100).
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Agee, James Rufus (1909-1955), writer
William Stott
Agee, James Rufus (27 November 1909–16 May 1955), writer, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of Hugh James Agee, a construction company employee, and Laura Whitman Tyler. The father’s family were poorly educated mountain farmers, while the mother’s were solidly middle class. Agee was profoundly affected by his father’s death in a car accident in 1916. He idealized his absent father and struggled against his mother and her genteel and (he felt) cold values. “Agee’s mother wanted him to be clean, chaste, and sober,” the photographer ...
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Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (1836-1907), author and editor
Robert Lee Lynch
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (11 November 1836–19 March 1907), author and editor, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the son of Elias Taft Aldrich, a businessman, and Sarah Abba Bailey. Aldrich was educated in Portsmouth under Samuel De Merritt, and the Portsmouth environs furnished the background for much of his work, as did the backdrops of New York City and Boston, where he spent his adult life. Aldrich moved to New York City at age sixteen to work in his uncle’s commission house. After reading ...
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Ames, Mary Clemmer (06 May 1831?–18 August 1884), journalist and author
Maurine H. Beasley
Ames, Mary Clemmer (06 May 1831?–18 August 1884), journalist and author, was born Mary Clemmer in Utica, New York, the daughter of Abraham Clemmer, a merchant, and Margaret Kneale. Her father came from an Alsatian Huguenot family that had settled in this country before the American Revolution, and her mother had emigrated from the British Isle of Man in 1827. She received her formal education at the Westfield Academy in Westfield, Massachusetts, where the family moved about 1847; she attended the academy probably until 1850. A poem that she wrote at the academy was published in the ...
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Angoff, Charles (1902-1979), editor and author
Martin Green
Angoff, Charles (22 April 1902–03 May 1979), editor and author, was born in Minsk, Russia, the son of Jacob Joseph Angoff, an unskilled laborer, and Anna Pollack. Young Angoff grew up in the Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of Boston, where his family moved in 1909 and which he later used as a backdrop for his fiction. Entering Harvard University on scholarship in 1919, Angoff studied philosophy with ...
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Arthur, Timothy Shay (1809-1885), editor, temperance crusader, and novelist
Claudia Durst Johnson
Arthur, Timothy Shay (06 June 1809–06 March 1885), editor, temperance crusader, and novelist, was born in Orange County, New York, the son of William Arthur and Anna Shay, occupations unknown. He was named for his maternal grandfather, Timothy Shay, an officer in the revolutionary war. By his mid-twenties, Arthur had yet to identify a profession or receive an education. In the 1830s, however, he began an intense program of self-education as well as a writing career as a journalist in Baltimore, where he quickly became a well-known and articulate champion of numerous social causes including temperance, Swedenborgianism, feminism, and socialism. In 1836 he married Eliza Alden; they had seven children....
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Bacheller, Irving (1859-1950), novelist and publishing executive
Ann T. Keene
Bacheller, Irving (26 September 1859–24 February 1950), novelist and publishing executive, was born Addison Irving Bacheller in Pierrepont, St. Lawrence County, New York, the son of Sanford Paul Bacheller and Achsah Ann Buckland, farmers. Irving attended local schools in Pierrepont, then switched to an academy in Canton, New York, after his family moved there. His secondary education at Clinton Academy was sporadic, however, as he spent long periods during his teenage years working at various jobs—telegraph operator, laborer, post office clerk, bookkeeper, salesman, teacher—to help support the family....
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Ballou, Maturin Murray (1820-1895), writer, editor, and publisher
Ann W. Engar
Ballou, Maturin Murray (14 April 1820–27 March 1895), writer, editor, and publisher, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Rev. Hosea Ballou and Ruth Washburn. His father was a distinguished Universalist minister and the author of more than 100 books. Ballou attended Boston’s English High School and, as a teenager, contributed travel sketches and other pieces to his cousin ...
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Barnes, Djuna (1892-1982), writer
Phillip Herring
Barnes, Djuna (12 June 1892–19 June 1982), writer, was born Djuna Chappell Barnes in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, the daughter of Wald Barnes (born Henry Budington, recorded as Buddington), a musician, and Elizabeth Chappell. She was raised mostly in her birthplace, Fordham, and Huntington, Long Island, New York. The Barnes family, which believed in sexual freedom, included four brothers by Djuna’s mother, plus Wald’s mistress Fanny Faulkner and their three children; they were supported largely by Wald’s mother, Zadel Barnes Budington Gustafson, a journalist and suffragist. Djuna’s parents and grandmother Zadel tutored the children, especially in the arts. With the blessing of her father and grandmother (over the objections of her mother), at seventeen Djuna eloped with a soap salesman, Percy Faulkner, brother of Fanny Faulkner, but stayed with him only a few weeks. Djuna attended school sporadically, if at all; later she attended Pratt Institute (1913) and the Art Students League of New York (1915), studying life drawing and illustration....
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Bernstein, Herman (1876-1935), writer
Gert Buelens
Bernstein, Herman (21 September 1876–31 August 1935), writer, was born in Neustadt-Scherwindt (Vladislavov), Lithuania, Russia, the son of David Bernstein, a merchant, and Maria Elsohn. When he was five, Bernstein’s family moved to Mogilov, Belorussia, where he received a traditional Jewish education as well as a thorough grounding in secular subjects. The family emigrated to New York in 1893, where Bernstein rapidly mastered English well enough to create poems in the language, published in 1899 as ...
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Bierce, Ambrose Gwinnett (24 June 1842–1914?)
Maker: Arnold Genthe
In
Ambrose Bierce Photograph by Arnold Genthe Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-G39-T-8065 ).
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Bierce, Ambrose Gwinnett (24 June 1842–1914?), author and journalist
Lawrence I. Berkove
Bierce, Ambrose Gwinnett (24 June 1842–1914?), author and journalist, was born in the Horse Cave settlement in Meigs County, Ohio, the son of Marcus Aurelius Bierce and Laura Sherwood, farmers. The family was poor and moved several times, eventually settling in Elkhart, Indiana. His parents were strongly evangelical Protestant, but Bierce early resented his religious indoctrination and moved toward agnosticism. He briefly attended the Kentucky Military Institute in 1859. He enlisted at once in the Union army when the Civil War began in 1861 and was soon appointed a sergeant. He was later commissioned a second lieutenant and had risen to first lieutenant when invalided out of the army because of wounds in January 1865. He was brevetted major by President ...
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Blake, Lillie Devereux (1835-1913), author and feminist
Ronald Yanosky
Blake, Lillie Devereux (12 August 1835–30 December 1913), author and feminist, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of George Pollok Devereux, a planter, and Sarah Elizabeth Johnson. Though she was christened Elizabeth Johnson, her father called her “Lilly,” and she adopted that name with altered spelling. The Devereux were prominent slaveholders, and Lillie spent her early years on her father’s cotton plantation. After George Devereux’s death in 1837, she moved with her mother and sister to Connecticut, joining her mother’s family there. She was raised in New Haven in an atmosphere of Episcopalian respectability and Whiggish political convictions. Her education at a girls’ school was supplemented by private tutoring based on courses in the Yale curriculum....
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Bradford, Roark Whitney Wickliffe (1886-1948), fiction writer and journalist
L. Moody Simms
Bradford, Roark Whitney Wickliffe (21 August 1886–13 November 1948), fiction writer and journalist, was born on his family’s cotton plantation in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, near the Mississippi River, the son of Richard Clarence Bradford, an affluent lawyer and planter, and Patricia Adelaide Tillman. Growing up on the plantation, Bradford played with the children of the nearly twenty black families that worked there. He frequently visited the black quarters and the local black church, all the while absorbing the stories and songs of the black plantation culture. This landscape proved to be the major influence on Bradford’s subsequent literary career, providing the basis for the settings and characters of much of the fiction that won him acclaim in the 1920s and 1930s....
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Brewster, Anne Hampton (1818-1892), fiction writer and foreign correspondent
Denise M. Larrabee
Brewster, Anne Hampton (29 October 1818–01 April 1892), fiction writer and foreign correspondent, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Francis Enoch Brewster, an attorney, and Maria Hampton. She and her family were middle-class Anglo-American Protestants. Her older brother, Benjamin Harris Brewster...
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Bromfield, Louis (1896-1956)
Maker: Carl Van Vechten
In
Louis Bromfield Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1933. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-103721).
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Bromfield, Louis (1896-1956), novelist, experimental farmer, and newspaper columnist
David D. Anderson
Bromfield, Louis (27 December 1896–18 March 1956), novelist, experimental farmer, and newspaper columnist, was born in Mansfield, Ohio, the son of Charles Bromfield, a banker and local Democratic office holder, and Annette Marie Coulter. His father was from an old New England family, and his mother was the daughter of a pioneer family of Richland County, Ohio; both ancestries would influence his later fiction. Bromfield attended Mansfield public schools, spending summers on his mother’s family’s farm. In 1914–1915 he studied agriculture at Cornell University and then briefly attended Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. He then studied journalism at Columbia University until his enlistment in the U.S. Army Ambulance Service in June 1917. He served with Section 577, attached to the French army, from December 1917 to February 1919. He participated in seven major battles during World War I and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was discharged in June 1919 while still in France....
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Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
In
Charles Brockden Brown. Watercolor on ivory, 1806, by William Dunlap. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; given in loving memory of Katharine Lea Hancock by her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.
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Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810), novelist, historian, and editor
Philip Barnard
Brown, Charles Brockden (17 January 1771–22 February 1810), novelist, historian, and editor, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Elijah Brown, a merchant and land conveyancer, and Mary Armitt. The fifth of six children in a prosperous Quaker family in the nation’s most cosmopolitan city and first capital, Brown was shaped in his early years by his Quaker background and the era’s tumultuous revolutionary politics. From 1781 to 1786 he received a classics-oriented secondary education under Robert Proud at the Friends’ Latin School of Philadelphia and displayed an enthusiasm for literary composition. Although his earliest work is lost, he composed derivative poetry in the “primitive” vein, based on the Psalms and Ossian and planned but never completed verse epics on the exploits of Columbus, Pizarro, and Cortez. The period’s political and ideological conflicts touched Brown’s family directly when revolutionary authorities exiled his father to Virginia for several months, deeming the father’s Quaker position of principled neutrality an aid to the British. While Brown’s Quaker background facilitated his early exposure to progressive British dissenting writers such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who would become crucial influences, it left him outside the period’s Congregationalist and Presbyterian cultural elite and predisposed him to his lifelong stance of reasoned skepticism of utopian or perfectionist notions for political change. That is, Brown’s background and early years helped shape his career-long concern with the violent ideological controversies of the early republic, as well as his characteristic tendency to see both the destructive and productive aspects of the period’s far-reaching political upheavals....
