Frederick Wadsworth Loring was an American author and journalist.
Background
Frederick Wadsworth Loring was born on December 12, 1848 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, the first of three sons of David Loring, a cabinet maker, and Mary Hall Stodder, a native New Englander. The first Loring in America was Deacon Thomas Loring who came from Devonshire, England, and joined the Hingham colony in Massachusetts in 1634. Under the guidance of his mother, Frederick read and absorbed English literature and was well versed in Shakespeare at the age of seven. Though she died when he was eleven years old, she left an indelible mark upon her devoted son who inherited her sympathetic sensitiveness and intelligence.
Education
Loring was sent to Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in 1866. Here he abhorred the exact sciences and used his pen to extravagance in ridiculing mathematical formulas. Only his unusual promise kept him within the pale. After the death of his friend Professor Elbridge J. Cutler, which was the second great grief of his life, he was befriended by James Russell Lowell. He was a regular contributor to the Harvard Advocate and while at college showed a passion for the drama. He made friends of actors and dramatists. Miss Mazie Mitchel, dramatist, permitted him to revise an act of her play and had the play produced. During these years also, to assist a friend, he wrote Wild Rose, which was produced with success in Boston by George Selwyn. He graduated in 1870.
Career
In 1870, Loring became assistant editor of the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. Later he was connected with the Boston Daily Advertiser and Every Saturday, "a journal of choice reading. " Meanwhile he contributed short stories as well as short poems to the Atlantic Monthly, New York Independent, New York World, and Appletons' Journal.
A serial story, "Two College Friends, " which appeared in Old and New (April, July 1871), was published in book form later in 1871. In 1870 he published in the Atlantic Monthly his poem "In the Church Yard at Fredericksburg". The Boston Dip, and Other Verses was published a year later. The publisher's advertisement quotes the New York Tribune as saying the poems were noticeable as "celebrating young love with a tenderness, flavored with a certain cool humor which might have been done by Thackeray in that fresh, earnest, enthusiastic stage of his literary career which he depicts in Arthur Pendennis. "
In 1871 Loring was sent with the Wheeler Expedition as correspondent for Appletons' Journal. His reports, written always in a light and humorous vein, were interesting. Apparently safe from the many dangers he had experienced, Loring took the Wickenburg and La Paz (Arizona) stage on his way home. The stage was attacked by Apaches and he was one of those killed.