Charles Wolcott Balestier

Background

He was born on December 13, 1861 in Rochester, New York, the eldest of the four children of Henry Wolcott and Anna (Smith) Balestier. Balestier's father died when he was nine, and his boyhood was spent in his grandfather's home in Rochester.

Education

During Mr. Smith's absence in Japan, the family roved about, and Wolcott attended school in Baltimore, Washington, New York, and Denver, as well as in Brattleboro, Vt. , the summer home of the older Balestiers. He was graduated from the Rochester Free Academy in 1880, and entered Cornell in 1881; as a freshman, he was president of his class, and a leader in college pranks. The following year was spent in the South and in Leadville, Colo. ; Western life impressed him deeply, and furnished the material for his best literary work. He was in charge of the patent collection of the Astor Library, New York, during most of the year 1884.

Career

When he was seventeen he had begun to send little tales and essays to the Atlantic Monthly. In his academy days he served as reporter on the Rochester Post-Express. His first novel, A Potent Philtre, a story of Canadian life, appeared in the New York Tribune in 1884; his next ventures, the love story A Fair Device, and a campaign life of James G. Blaine, were published in the same year, by John W. Lovell. In 1886 appeared his story of Moravian life in Bethlehem, entitled A Victorious Defeat.

He had early shown an interest in the drama, and had an amateur company of his own before entering college; in 1884 he dramatized the novel Gwenn for Maggie Mitchell, but the play was never produced. The connection with Lovell was to control the rest of Balestier's life. In 1885 he was engaged as editor of Tid-Bits, a weekly miscellany; in 1886 this was transformed into Time, an illustrated humorous paper, to which Balestier attracted many writers and artists of note. The Lovell business consisted largely in the issue of cheap unauthorized reprints of English books. International copyright was, however, in the air, and in 1888 Balestier was sent to England to secure original manuscripts for the firm. He was an ideal ambassador and soon enlisted the pens of the best writers of England. Arriving unknown, within a few months he had made his rooms in Dean's Yard, Westminster, a literary center unparalleled in the London of that day; he knew everybody.

In 1889 Balestier was joined in London by his mother and sisters. He met Kipling soon after the latter's arrival in England, and shortly added his name to the Lovell list; his sister Caroline became Mrs. Kipling in 1892. In spite of engrossing business, Balestier never ceased to be a writer; his inclination was toward the photographic realism of Howells, his friend and ideal. He took to England the proof-sheets of Benefits Forgot, a Colorado novel, and polished away at them constantly; it was published serially in the Century Magazine after his death, and later (1894) in book form.

Association with Kipling was a new spur to his literary ambition, and the two collaborated in The Naulahka (1892), to which Balestier contributed the American chapters. After a summer in the Isle of Wight, when he showed alarming signs of overwork, he set out for a business trip to Germany; seized with typhoid, he died on December 6, 1891, in a private hospital in Dresden, where he was buried.

Achievements

• His short and eager life was a promise rather than an achievement. Though his literary gift was unquestioned, it was as a friend and a business man that he made the deepest impression. He is widely known for his collaboration with Kipling.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Benefits Forgot. A Novel.

    (Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary...)

  • The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling ...: The Naulahka; a Story of West and East, Written in Collaboration With Wolcott Balestier

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • The Naulahka: A Story of West and East

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Departmental Ditties: Barrack-room Ballads And Other Verses. The Five Nations. The Seven Seas

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • book

Personality

Balestier was a man of slight frame, but of great intensity of mind and body. Edmund Gosse describes him as a carefully dressed young-old man, spare and stooping, with smooth dark hair and whimsically mobile mouth; his complexion was pallid, his dark blue eyes deep set. For sport, for money, he cared nothing; success in the literary business which he had undertaken was his one goal.

Connections

Father:

Henry Wolcott

Mother:

Anna (Smith) Balestier

colleague:

Rudyard Kipling