Park Benjamin was an American poet, journalist, and founder of several newspapers.
Background
Park Benjamin was the son of Parke Benjamin, a sea-captain and trader of old New England stock who had extensive interests in Norwich, Connecticut, and Demerara, British Guiana. His mother, Mary Judith Gall, was a native of Barbados. He was born on August 14, 1809, in Demerara, and remained there until the age of four, when he was sent to Norwich to receive treatment for an affliction which, nevertheless, left him permanently lame, with shrunken limbs. The rest of his life was spent in the United States.
Education
Benjamin's early schooling was received at Colchester, Connecticut, and Jamaica Plain, Massachussets. In 1825 he entered Harvard, but two years later, in accordance with his father's wish, he transferred to Washington, now Trinity, College, at Hartford. He graduated in 1829.
Career
After his graduation Benjamin founded the Norwich Spectator, which survived but ten issues - the first of a long list of editorial and publishing ventures. In 1830 he entered the Harvard Law School but with characteristic restlessness removed to the Yale Law School in 1832. For a time he lived in Boston, nominally practising law, on friendly terms with the literary set. He had already written much verse. The Harbinger, published in 1833 in aid of a charitable fair, was made up of poems which Benjamin, his former Harvard classmate O. W. Holmes, and John O. Sargent had previously contributed to magazines. In 1834 he was employed by Joseph T. Buckingham on the New England Magazine, and in 1835 he became editor and owner. At the close of the year the magazine was discontinued and merged with the American Monthly Magazine in New York, and Benjamin became associated with Charles Fenno Hoffman in the editorship. After various vicissitudes this periodical came to an end in 1838.
For a short period Benjamin was literary editor of Horace Greeley's New Yorker. By this time he had come to be known as a caustic literary critic. After a brief connection with the Evening Tattler, a one-cent daily, and the Brother Jonathan, a literary weekly, he withdrew to found in 1839 journals of his own on the same plan - the Evening Signal and the New World. R. W. Griswold was at first associated with the New World, but Benjamin frequently had difficulties with his colleagues, and Griswold remained for only five issues. The New World, the most important and the longest-lived of Park Benjamin's publishing experiments, was one of the fairly profitable but much censured journals which throve by reprinting British writings without remuneration to the authors.
Besides the material in the regular numbers Benjamin issued "extras" containing novels and other longer works. Under the lax postal laws these could be mailed at the periodical rate; a revision of the law that conferred this privilege hastened the downfall of the New World. Besides British books the extras included a few American writings of no value, the one famous one being Walt Whitman's temperance novel, Franklin Evans. In both the editorial conduct and the selling methods of the New World and the Evening Signal Benjamin adopted the sensational devices of personal journalism. He was especially noted for his vituperative abuse of rival editors and conspicuous authors, the Signal winning a place in the list of papers that were successfully sued for libel by James Fenimore Cooper.
After the suspension of the New World in 1845 Benjamin planned a number of undertakings, literary and other, some of which were never begun and none of which were of long continuance. One of his many publishing ventures was a literary weekly in Baltimore. An example of his methods of attracting attention is afforded by a special Fourth-of-July issue of the Constellation, "The most gigantic paper the world has seen, " printed on a single sheet 72 by 100 inches. For sometime he conducted a literary agency; and he went on the lyceum platform, sometimes lecturing, more frequently reading didactic and mostly satiric treatises in heroic couplet composed for the purpose. Benjamin spent the remainder of his life rather quietly in New York.
Achievements
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Edgar Allan Poe had mixed feelings about Benjamin, calling his writing "lucid, terse, and pungent" and his character "witty, often cuttingly sarcastic, but seldom humorous. "
Connections
In 1848, Park Benjamin married Mary Brower Western of Dosoris Island, Long Island.