(John C. Calhoun remains a striking and central figure in ...)
John C. Calhoun remains a striking and central figure in American history. From 1811 to 1850 he served as a representative from South Carolina, secretary of war, vice president, secretary of state, and senator. During the same period, he was twice contender for the presidency of the United States. From the beginning to the end of his career, Calhoun arrested public attention and influenced public opinion, having a major influence on every issue of the period. A champion of state rights, he is an important figure in the drama of expansion ad conflict that is at the heart of American history in the nineteenth-century.
Margaret Louise Coit was an American writer. She is best remembered as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography on John C. Calhoun.
Background
Margaret Louise Coit was born on May 30, 1922, in Norwich, Connecticut, United States to the family of a stockbroker Archa Willoughby Coit and the principal of a private day school Grace Trow. When the Great Depression started the family moved to North Carolina. Growing up there, Margaret Louise became interested in John Caldwell Calhoun, the preeminent political figure of the South and a later symbol of the lost cause of defending slavery.
Education
In North Carolina, the family settled in Greensboro. There Margaret Louise attended Curry School from where she graduated in 1937. After that, she went to Woman's college (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). Her majors were English and history. That was the period when she also immersed in writing - the student edited the college magazine and wrote for the school paper. In 1941 Margaret Louise earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.
After completing the education, Margaret Louise worked as a correspondent and a book reviewer for a number of newspapers in Massachusetts: the Lawrence Daily Eagle, Newburyport Daily News, Haverhill Gazette and was making her research on the former United States secretary of state and vice president John C. Calhoun. As a result, in 1950 her first autobiography John C. Calhoun: American Portrait was published. It was hailed for revealing the complex, real man behind the image of a cold and forbidding politician.
In 1950, after the release of the book, Margaret Louise was invited to teach at Fairleigh Dickinson University at its Rutherford branch. First, she was a visiting professor in the English department. Then, she became a professor of social science growing a full professor of history in 1971 and retiring in 1984.
Besides, Coit taught at the University of Colorado, wrote for the Saturday Review, The Nation, American Heritage, and continued to write biographies. Among the latest: Mr. Baruch (1957), about the financier Bernard Baruch, and Andrew Jackson (1965), a biography for younger readers. Her authoritative biography on Calhoun gave her the opportunity to edit a later biography, Calhoun: Great Lives Observed (1970).
From 1985 to 1987 Margaret Louise taught a course on the American presidency at Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown.