Herringshaw's Encyclopedia of American Biography

Thousands of short American lives — soldiers, inventors, preachers, governors, novelists — each given a paragraph: born where, did what, and why anyone remembered.

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Bryant, William Cullen

poet, was born Nov. 3, 1794, in Cummington, Mass. He was a journalist of New York.

He early began the practice of law, but soon abandoned it for journalism and, removing to New York in 1825, became in 1828 the editor of the Evening Post, with which he remained associated until his death. His earliest poem, The Embargo, a political satire, was published when its author was but thirteen, but the first collection of his poems was not made until 1821, the famous Thanatopsis being one of the eight which the volume comprised. The quantity of Bryant's verse is small, the quality high, but not uniformly so. Its tone is usually calmly philosophic, and it rarely makes any very effective appeal to the sympathies, its coldness arising partly from lack of humor, partly from natural reserve. He is the author of The Embargo; The Spanish Revolution; The Ages; The Fountain of Youth, and Other Poems; The White-Footed Deer; The Flood of Years; Thirty Poems; translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, both in unrhymed heroic pentameter; Letters of a Traveler, a prose work; and Orations and Addresses. He died June 12, 1878, in New York.

BRYANT, WILLIAM MCKENDREE, educator, author, was born in 1843, in Indiana. He is a prominent educator of St. Louis, and the author of Philosophy of Landscape Painting; The World Energy and its Self-Conservation; Syllabus of Psychology; Ethics and the New Education; and Text Books of Psychology.

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