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Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz was an American writer. Together with herr husband she also operated an all-girls school in Alabama.
Background
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz was born on June I, 1800, in Lancaster, Massachusetts, United States, the youngest of the eight children of John and Orpah Whiting, and the sixth in descent from the Rev. Samuel Whiting, who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1636. Her father, who had fought in the Revolution, and three of her brothers became officers in the United States army.
Career
She engaged in authorship. Composition cost her no effort; she could write in spare half-hours, in a room filled with children, or with friends looking on and reading over her shoulder. Thus at intervals she contributed poems and tales to several magazines. In 1831 she won a prize of $500 which was offered by William Pelby for a play based on the Moorish conquest of Spain. Pelby, in financial straits and unable to pay the full amount of the award, returned the copyright to her. Touched apparently by his honesty, she favored him with another play, Constance of Werdcnberg (said to have been published in the Columbus, Ga. , Times and Sentinel), which was performed at the Park Theatre, New York, in 1832. A third play, Lamorah or the Western Wild, was performed in Cincinnati in 1832 and in Caldwell’s Theatre, New Orleans, Jan. 1, 1833. Aunt Patty’s Scrap Bag, one of her best-known tales, appeared in 1846.
In 1849 her husband became an invalid, and she herself was ill for many months. They had to close their school, and thereafter Mrs. Hentz supported the family. Working assiduously, she produced a series of novels amazingly popular in their generation and republished as late as 1889: Linda or The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850); Rena or The Snow Bird (1851); Marcus Warland or The Long Moss Spring (1852) ; Helen and Arthur or Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel (1853) ; The Planter’s Northern Bride (2 vols. , 1854), her most ambitious effort; Robert Graham: A Sequel to Linda (1855) ; Ernest Linwood (1836) ; and a number of others. Her shorter tales were collected and published in several volumes, including The Victim of Excitement and Other Stories (1853) ; Wild Jack (1853) ; Courtship and Marriage or The Joys and Sorrows of American Life (1856) ; and The Banished Son, and Other Stories of the Heart (1856).
Mrs. Hentz was pained by the widening breach between North and South and strove in her novels to represent negro slavery as a beneficent social arrangement. She and her husband spent their last years with their grown children in Marianna and St. Andrews, Fla. She died in Marianna of pneumonia, her strength weakened by long attendance on her sick husband, and was buried in the Episcopal cemetery.
On September 30, 1824, Caroline married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, a native of Metz, who had left France for political reasons. He was a man of various accomplishments, a miniature painter, an entomologist, and the author of at least one novel, Tadeuskund, the Last King of the Lenape: An Historical Tale (1825). His monograph on the spiders of the United States was once famous and is still consulted. At the time of their marriage he was employed under George Bancroft in the Round Hill School in Northampton. He was a professor in the University of North Carolina, 1826-1830, and conducted a girls’ school in Covington, Kentucky, 1830-1832; in Cincinnati, 1832-1834; in Florence, Alabama, 1834-1843; in Tuscaloosa, 1843-1845; in Tuskegee, 1845-1848; and in Columbus, Georgia, 1848-1849.