Gamaliel Bradford was an American biographer, author and dramatist. He is best known for his development of the “psychograph,” a type of biography that focuses on analyzing personality rather than providing a chronological account of a subject’s life.
Background
Gamaliel Bradford was born on October 9, 1863 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was a son of Gamaliel Bradford V, a banker, and Clara Crowninshield (Kinsman) Bradford.
In 1965, the family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts where soon his mother died. Gamaliel lived at 493 Worcester Street of this town till the end of his life.
Gamaliel Bradford was the sixth of this name descendents of Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford. His grandfather, Dr. Gamaliel Bradford IV, was an American physician and the adherent of abolitionism.
Bradford was a sickly child and remained a semi-invalid all his life, suffering from various health problems including severe vertigo, sciatica, rheumatism, and a number of intestinal disorders.
Education
Having poor health, Gamaliel Bradford attended the schools of Wellesley occasionally, and most of the time he was home scholled by private tutors. However, Bradford showed a keen interst in academics as well as school sports. So, he was the first president of the Maugus Club, founded in 1893, which offered squash, badminton and table tennis.
Although, Bradford enrolled at the Harvard University in 1882, but left the institution without receiving a degree after only six weeks and was privately taught Greek, Latin, and mathematics.
As Bradford said, he educated himself "by vast, vague, utterly erratic reading." and "by ill health and a vagrant imagination."
Initially, Gamaliel Bradford wanted to be a creative writer but was unsuccessful in attempts to publish his numerous plays, novels, and poems. The New Princeton Review accepted his essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1888, and he began to concentrate on biographical writing.
Bradford’s first book, Types of American Character, was published seven years later and has been viewed as an early example of his interest in character analysis for its consideration of such personality types as “The American Pessimist” and “The American Man of Letters.” Following the publication of this work, Bradford published the novels The Private Tutor, Between Two Masters, and Matthew Porter, A Story of Today, and the poetry collection A Pageant of Life, and contributed essays to the Atlantic Monthly, Andover Review, New Princeton Review and other periodicals.
Gamaliel Bradford coined the term “psychograph” early in his career when he realized that it had been already used by George Saintsbury to describe the works of the French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. From this time, Bradford became fascinated by writings of Sainte-Beuve, although the method he developed was ultimately his own. Сontrary to biography which explores the personality chronologically, psychography does it topically, according to aspects of a subject’s personality. So, psychography focuses on an individual, not on the human nature. Believing that certain fundamental aspects of a person’s character remain constant throughout life, Bradford sought to uncover those traits through an examination of his subject’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, and then to compose an integrated analysis of the person’s character.
The first Bradford’s significant biographical work which presented this psychographic method, was a collection of essays about Robert E. Lee, published in 1912.
During the next two decades Bradford employed his technique in such works as Damaged Souls – whose subjects, including Benedict Arnold and P. T. Barnum, were men whom Bradford found to have tragic character flaws.
At the end of his life, Gamaliel Bradford typed one page per day containing of 350 words. According to critics, Bradford’s representations of literary persons (William Cowper and Emily Dickinson, for example) as well as his later works, such as Bare Souls, Wives, and Daughters of Eve, are more expert and strong than his portrayals of military leaders and his early works.
Quotations:
"I should prefer to write great novels, but we do what we can, not what we should like."
"What strange perversity is it that induces a man to set his heart on doing those things which he has not succeeded in, and makes him slight those in which his achievement has been respectable."
"There is no means by which men so powerfully elude their ignorance, disguise it from themselves and from others as by words."
"All men who are really great can afford to be really human and to be shown so."
"Many earnest persons, who have found direct education for themselves fruitless and unprofitable, declare that they first began to learn when they began to teach, and that in education of others they discovered the secret of their own."
"In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are."
"Thinking is the process that I hold in horror. I have thought for fifty years, with the most ghastly and disastrous results, mostly thoughts of my own, and if I attempt to superpose the thoughts of other people, I find my mental equipment utterly inadequate to the strain."
"We have smothered ourselves, buried ourselves in the vast heap of inforamtion which all of us have and none of us has."
"The ultimate test of the laughing instinct is that a man should always be ready to laugh at himself."
"The best translation is not that which is most like the original but which is the most different from it."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1931
Personality
Gamaliel Bradford was known among his friends and colleagues as a perseverant person whose fight against his illnesses was of distinguished courage.
Bradford was hospitable and good-hearted often gathering young authors, artists and friends in his home to spend time on pleasant reading. One of the guests said about Gamaliel that “There was a poise and self-control that invited confidences,” and “his personal philosophy is expressed all throughout his works. He was ever trying to answer the great riddles of life”.
Quotes from others about the person
"Lee the American must be considered an altogether indispensable book. Its discriminating analysis is supported by a wealth of humanized evidence and vital illustration, and it gives a superb and convincing portrayal of the actual soul of Lee." - Garland Greever
"Damaged Souls is deeply characteristic of Bradford’s range of sympathy and of his refusal of the cheap and easy debunking. It was like Bradford to seek the real humanity beneath the legends of Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr." - Frances Wentworth Knickerbocker, an author
Interests
Writers
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Connections
Gamaliel Bradford married Helen Hubbard Ford on October 30, 1886. The couple had two children. Their first-born, Gamaliel Bradford VII, died at the young age. Their second child's name was Sarah Rice Bradford.