Background
He was born at East Machias, Maine on December 16, 1850.
He was born at East Machias, Maine on December 16, 1850.
His formal education began with the schools of East Machias, where he graduated from the Washington Academy in 1870. His class in Bowdoin was that of 1876 and it was during his college course that his literary career began.
His first payment for writing was a check for three dollars from the Portland Transcript. In 1876 he went to Boston, lived in an attic, and wrote copiously; but the greater part of his manuscript was returned, and for a year he had to support himself by teaching and by painting china.
In 1878 he was made secretary of a Republican organization and edited a fortnightly political journal called The Broadside, and served also as a clerk in the office of "a firm dealing in metals. " His work on The Broadside may very probably have led to his appointment as editor of the Boston Sunday Courier, in 1880, a position which he held till 1893. During this period he produced the larger part of his purely literary work, including nine novels and four volumes of verse. In 1893 he became professor of English in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1894, at the centennial celebration of the incorporation of Bowdoin College, he read a poem called The Torch Bearers, afterward published separately. In 1911, at a meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Tufts College, he delivered a poem, The Supreme Gift, which also was separately published. The later years of his life were spent in Otis Place, Boston, where his life work had been done, and where, after a long illness, he died.
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His marriage in 1882 to Harriet L. Vose, daughter of Prof. George L. Vose and Abby Thompson Vose, was a singularly happy union, but was cut short by her untimely death in 1886.
