Chapter Writers of New York and Pennsylvania of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

series of travel sketches. In The Potiphar Papers (1853) he satirized some tendencies in New York society.

The Orator.

During the decade just preceding the Civil War, Curtis participated not only as a writer but also as a public speaker in the great debate on slavery, and laid the foundation of his later fame as one of the most forceful and graceful of American orators -- a reputation maintained to the end of his career.

In Fiction and Essay.

In 1856, Curtis published a charming little work of light and delicate sentiment entitled Prue and I, a work which was exceedingly popular at the time, and which retains its popularity still. Trumps, an experiment in novel writing, appeared in 1861. The chief claim of Curtis to literary distinction, however, is as an essayist. For nearly fifty years he was associated editorially with Harper's Magazine, and throughout that period contributed regularly those delightful papers -- essays in miniature -- which we associate with the department so sympathetically named "the Easy Chair." Something of the Addisonian flavor, with more of the spirit of Charles Lamb, is to be recognized in these vivacious contributions of comment, criticism, and reminiscence. Nevertheless, Curtis was as much a master of a style distinctly his own as was the author of the Autocrat. Three volumes of selections from these papers have been published, some of the essays appearing in an expanded form. Two volumes of Orations and Addresses have also appeared, including the eulogies on Wendell Phillips and James Russell Lowell.

J. G. Holland, 1819-1881.

Josiah Gilbert Holland was a Massachusetts physician when he left his professional practice and, like Taylor and Curtis, entered journalism in New York. Over the pen-name Timothy Titcomb, Dr. Holland, while editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, wrote a series of familiar essays, letters of wholesome counsel, which were received with favor in book form under the title Timothy Titcomb's Letters (1858). The publication of two volumes of verse, The Bay Path (1857) and Bitter-Sweet (1858), gave him a place among the "popular poets," which was re-inforced by the appearance of Kathrina, a sentimental romance in metre, in 1867. Dr. Holland's claims to literary distinction are not especially strong, but his novels, Miss Gilbert's Career (1860), Arthur Bonnicastle (1873), Seven oaks (1875), and Nicholas Minturn (1877), were widely read. In 1870, he became the editor of the new Scribner's Magazine (which in 1881 changed its name to the Century).

"Ik Marvel," 1822-1908.

Donald Grant Mitchell, a member of this same interesting group of genial essayists who long survived the rest, is the author of two delightful books which, like Curtis's Prue and I, still retain a popularity hardly diminished by the lapse of a generation. Reveries of a Bachelor was published in 1850, Dream Life in 1851. The same charm of style and matter pervades My Farm of Edgewood (1863) and Wet Days at Edgewood (1864); nor is it lacking in the volumes of literary anecdote, English Lands, Letters, and Kings (1889) and American Lands and Letters (1897-1899).

C. D. Warner, 1829-1900.

Charles Dudley Warner, whose delightful sketchbook, My Summer in a Garden (1870), suggests comparison with the "Edgewood" books, was born in Massachusetts. For many years he was a member of the famous literary coterie in Hartford, Connecticut, his professional duties -- he was also a journalist -- associating him with the New York group. His pleasant volume of Backlog Studies appeared in 1872. In collaboration with Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), he wrote The Gilded Age (1873). Two volumes of travel sketches, My Winter on the Nile and In the Levant, were published in 1876. Being a Boy, a picturesque presentation of youth on a New England farm, belongs to the year following. Warner was the author of numerous