(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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Laura Catherine Redden Searing was an American poet and journalist.
Background
Laura Catherine was born on February 9, 1840 in Somerset County, Maryland, United States, daughter of Littleton John Redden and Wilhelmina Waller Redden. In her early life, her parents moved to St. Louis, Missouri.
Until she was about eleven she was unusually healthy; then, after a serious illness, she suddenly became completely deaf and was unable to speak except with great effort and in a sepulchral tone. Her sensitiveness soon led to the development of an impediment in her speech, so that she depended entirely upon writing for conversation except with those who understood the manual alphabet.
Education
Laura Catherine Redden attended the Missouri Institution for Deaf Mutes at St. Louis.
Career
Redden began her literary career in 1859 with editorial work on a religious paper published in St. Louis and with miscellaneous articles and poems contributed to the St. Louis Republican. Writing under the pseudonym Howard Glyndon, she expressed such intense patriotism and devotion to the Union cause that her articles were widely copied, and she was sent to Washington as correspondent for the Republican during the Civil War.
Her first two books were published while she was in the capital: Notable Men in "the House" (1862) and Idyls of Battle (1864), a volume of war poems. One of the poems, "Belle Missouri, " was adopted as the war song of the loyalists of Missouri.
From February 1865 to the close of 1868 she was in Europe, writing articles for the St. Louis Republican, the New York Times, and the New York Sun, and studying languages. Upon her return to New York, she severed her connection with the Times but wrote for the New York Evening Mail as a staff member and for the New York Tribune. Her poems continued to appear in Harper's Monthly and Harper's Weekly, the Atlantic Monthly, Putnam's Magazine, Galaxy, Arena, and the Alaska-Yukon Magazine.
Her most successful volume of verse, Sounds from Secret Chambers, was published in 1873. About 1871 she learned of the new Clarke school for articulation at Northampton, Massachussets. There, after long patient effort under the guidance of Alexander Graham Bell, she learned the control of pitch, tone, and enunciation through feeling, so that she could speak freely and naturally. Lip-reading she never mastered, being forced to discontinue study of it under Zerah C. Whipple in Mystic, Connecticut, where she had gone for her health, seriously impaired now by the double strain of all her study and her literary engagements.
After 1886 she made her permanent home in Santa Cruz, California. For some years before her death she was a semi-invalid, living at the San Mateo home of her only child, writing nothing after 1908, talking little, and seeing but few of her friends. In 1921 her daughter published a complete edition of her poems, Echoes of Other Days.
Achievements
Being a deaf journalist, Laura Searing covered and documented the American Civil War. Her most famous works: Notable Men of the House, Idyls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion, A Little Boy's Story, Sounds from Secret Chambers and others.
The town of Glyndon, Minnesota was founded in 1872 and named in honor of the writer.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
Politics
Laura Catherine Redden was a pro-Union loyalist.
Personality
Religious faith, courage in spite of disillusionment and difficulties, and devotion to a cause, Laura Catherine expressed with a simple sincerity. She had a close familiarity with the Bible and with the great English and American poets.
Connections
In 1876 Laura Catherine Redden was married at Mystic, Connecticut, to Edward W. Searing, a New York attorney who was a native of Sherwood, New York. They had one child, Elsa Waller Searing, on May 4, 1880. They divorced in 1894.
