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Oscar Penn Fitzgerald was a Methodist clergyman, journalist and educator.
Background
Oscar Penn Fitzgerald son of Richard and Martha Jones (Hooper) Fitzgerald, was born in Caswell County, North Carolina. His father and mother were intensely pious. They regularly attended revivals and camp-meetings, and Oscar at the age of four had already seen much of such matters. At that time one of his favorite diversions was to assemble a group of his playmates and preach to them, calling them to repentance after the approved formulas.
Education
He attended the schools of the community until he was thirteen. At that time one of his favorite diversions was to assemble a group of his playmates and preach to them, calling them to repentance after the approved formulas.
Career
He went to Lynchburg, Virginia, to take a position in a newspaper office. Soon after his father enlisted for the Mexican War, and he was obliged to go home and help support his mother. He did this by running a country school.
Upon the return of his father he went to Richmond to work for John Moncure Daniel, then editor of the Examiner. There he read widely and attended many lectures—among others, the one given by Poe on the poetic principle. After several years in Richmond, he lived for a brief time in Columbia, South Carolina, and in Macon, Georgia.
In Macon, during a protracted illness, he found his thoughts running on religion, and on his recovery he felt a strong religious bent.
He developed into an effective preacher, always somewhat dominated in his method by the far from subtle clerical models he had observed in his childhood. He had the faculty of making the unrighteous doubtful of their final welfare, and when he had been in Savannah about a year his superiors determined to send him to California as a missionary.
In California, after preaching for a while, he became editor of the Pacific Methodist Advocate and the Christian Spectator; and although he was openly sympathetic with the South in the Civil War, he was from 1867 to 1871 state superintendent of public education. From 1878 to 1890 he edited the Nashville, Tennessee, Christian Advocate, and in 1890 he was made a bi shop.
He continued to reside in Nashville. In 1880 he published California Sketches, some notes on his experiences in the West; a “Second Series” followed in 1881. Glimpses of Truth, made up of sententious, pious extracts from the Advocate, was published in 1883.
The Whetstone, offering a thought for every day in the year, was published in 1897. Upper Room Meditations (1903) is smoother in its approach but essentially the same kind of book. The bishop’s most notable writing was a series of biographies of great or near-great Southern religionists —Dr. Summers (1884), John B. McFerrin (1888), Judge Longstreet (1891), some sketches under the title Centenary Cameos (1885), and Eminent Methodists (1896). These works, while valuable as social history, do not always retain the briskness and charm found in them by a generation familiar with their theme; they are sentimental and discursive, likely at any time to break into apostrophe to some place or person or state of affairs quite irrelevant to the subject in hand. Sunset Views (1901) and Fifty Years (1903) are primarily autobiographical, but they contain a number of informal essays and the briefs of several lectures and sermons. They seem to vouch so far as concerns the personal qualities of their author for great sweetness and modesty, for a lovable thing almost like shyness.
During the last ten years of his life he was infirm in health and unable to carry out the active duties of his office.