Background

He was born on September 7, 1866 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. A descendant of Alexander Sampson, who came to Boston from England early in the eighteenth century. He was the son of William S. Sampson, a manufacturer, whose father had settled there about 1830, and of Virginia Ada (Wright) Sampson.

Education

Before his graduation, in 1888, from the University of Cincinnati, where his literary and scholarly tastes were encouraged by James Morgan Hart, he spent a year in study at the University of Munich. In 1890 he received the degree of M. A. from Cincinnati.

Career

Meanwhile he had begun the work as teacher of English which, with intervals of study and travel abroad, occupied the remainder of his life: first at the University of Iowa (1889 - 91), then at Stanford (1892 - 93), then at Indiana (1893 - 1906), and finally at Cornell University (1908 - 30). His favorite subjects were the English romantic poets, the modern novel, the Elizabethan drama, and the history of the drama.

At Cornell University he gave afternoon readings before the students of engineering, who dropped in from their shops and laboratories bringing their pipes with them. Entertaining them at first with stories by popular authors and with humorous verse, often of his own composition, he gradually introduced more substantial fare, and soon had them listening with genuine interest to Milton and Plato.

He encouraged the literary aspirations of the undergraduate by founding the Manuscript Club, a group of students who met at his house on Saturday evenings to read aloud their original stories, poems, and plays. In 1909 he established the Frances Sampson Fine Arts Prize, awarded annually for evidence of appreciation. In 1917 he organized the Cornell unit of the American Ambulance Field Service, the first to reach the front under the American flag.

He edited Camion Letters from American College Men, Volunteer Drivers of the American Field Service in France, 1917 (1918) and just before his death, which resulted from an automobile accident, he completed the editing of Military Records of Cornell University in the World War (1930).

A collection of tales written originally for his own children, The Good Giant (1928), met with public favor. His attitude toward academic problems was entertainingly presented in a one-act satire, The Soul of a Professor (published in Cornell University Plays, 1932). A volume of his poems, Voices of the Forest, was published posthumously in 1933.

Achievements

• While at Indiana University, by insisting that no pupil should be graduated who could not write clear and correct English, he raised the standard of English in the high schools of the state. He also founded the university's first dramatic club. Sampson published his famous textbook, Written and Oral Composition (1907), in collaboration with E. O. Holland, and edited a number of important works of English and American literature, among them The Lyric and Dramatic Poems of John Milton (1901), Webster's The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfy (1904), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1912), Middleton's plays (1915), and Henry James's Daisy Miller (1927) and The Ambassadors (1930). His introductory essays are urbane in style and illuminating as criticism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The White Devil and the Duchess of Malfy

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Written and Oral Composition

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Camion Letters from American College Men

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The ambassadors,

Connections

He married in 1892 Frances Van Rensselaer Gardiner, who died in 1909. In 1910 he married Julia Dauchy Pattison, by whom he had four children.

Father:

William S. Sampson

Mother:

Virginia Ada (Wright) Sampson

Spouse:

Julia Dauchy Pattison

Spouse:

Frances Van Rensselaer Gardiner

collaborator:

E. O. Holland

influencer:

James Morgan Hart