Josiah Gilbert Holland, known to his immense nineteenth-century readership as J. G. Holland and, in his newspaper essays, as “Timothy Titcomb,” was born on 24 July 1819 in Belchertown, Massachusetts, and died on 12 October 1881 in New York City. During his lifetime he occupied an unusually broad place in American literary culture: he was a physician by training, a journalist, editor, moral essayist, novelist, biograp…
“Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on what we're made of.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Sorrow
Stephen Crane, born 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, and dead of tuberculosis on 5 June 1900 in Badenweiler, Germany, lived only twenty-eight years, yet his work altered the direction of American fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is commonly placed among the major writers of literary naturalism, beside such figures as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, but the label only partly contains him. Crane was at once…
“I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony