John Bartlett was an American writer and publisher. His best-known work, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, has been continually revised and reissued for a century after his death.
Background
Bartlett was born on June 14, 1820, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to William Bartlett and Susan Thacher. His father was a descendant of Mayflower Pilgrims Love Brewster, a founder of the town of Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
William Brewster, the Pilgrim colonist leader and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony. His mother was a direct descendant of Anthony and Elizabeth Thacher who were the sole survivors of a terrible shipwreck on August 14, 1635, in which twenty-one passengers including their four children were drowned.
Career
As a young man, John Bartlett began working as a clerk at the University Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Between customers, Bartlett read widely and kept journals of noteworthy quotations. He became known as a useful reference source for customer questions and eventually bought the University Book Store.
Bartlett’s knowledge and passion for reading and compiling quotations led to the creation of his Familiar Quotations: Being an Attempt to Trace to Their Source Passages and Phrases in Common Use (1855). Other editors have revised and enlarged this book under a host of titles, but subsequent editions often still list Bartlett as the original compiler. In the first edition, Bartlett includes a large number of quotations from the Bible and the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. The work also features entries from other British writers and nonliterary figures such as the American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin. As these choices reflect the literary canon of Bartlett’s day, more recent editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations include quotations from more contemporary sources in a wide range of fields.
The success of Bartlett’s original volume attracted the attention of the publisher Little, Brown & Company. Little, Brown hired Bartlett and began publishing revised editions of his Familiar Quotations. While Bartlett continued to work on his book of quotations, he made other contributions to the world of letters. He compiled a Catalog of Books on Angling, Including Ichthyology, Pisciculture, Fisheries, and Fishing Laws and two books relating to Shakespeare, The Shakespeare PhraseBook and A New and Complete Concordance or Verbal Index to Words, Phrases, and Passages in the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare.
In 1892, Bartlett was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“It’s a precision tool, of course; but believe it or not, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is also one of the most readable books of the season." - William Hogan
Connections
In 1851, Bartlett married the daughter of a Harvard professor of Hebrew, Hannah Stanifield Willard, who became an influential figure on his work.