Background
George Thomas Lanigan was born at St. Charles, on the Richelieu River, Canada, and is said to have been connected on his mother's side with the Webster family of New England.
George Thomas Lanigan was born at St. Charles, on the Richelieu River, Canada, and is said to have been connected on his mother's side with the Webster family of New England.
He attended high school in Montreal.
Lanigan worked on the government telegraph lines as operator and later as superintendent. His ambition to take up journalism, formed when as a boy he had contributed to the New York Albion, found opportunity during the Fenian disturbances in 1866, when he sent special correspondence to the New York Herald.
With a group of associates he then started in Montreal a satirical and humorous paper, the Free Lance, which later became the Evening Star. Selling out his share in the Free Lance, he subsequently went to Chicago and became a special writer for the Chicago Times. About 1870 he moved to St. Louis, where he was employed on the St. Louis Daily Globe. His vivid articles on the smallpox ravages there are said to have aroused objections and lost him his position. He returned to Chicago, where he wrote for the Chicago Tribune and became western correspondent of the New York World.
In 1874 he was asked to join the World editorial staff, on which he served for the next eight years. His command of French led to his specialization on foreign news. His Sunday "Crême des Chroniques" column was notably popular, as well as his satirical verse fables, published in book form in 1878 as Fables of G. Washington 'sop, Taken "Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World" (1878). He also published a collection called National Ballads of Canada (Montreal, 1878). His celebrated "Threnody for the Ahkoond of Swat" and "The Amateur Orlando" are included in Rossiter Johnson's Play-Day Poems (1878) and other anthologies.
In June 1883 he became editor of the Rochester Post-Express but resigned the next year, when he was not allowed to support Cleveland for President, and joined the staff of the Philadelphia Record. Here he remained until his death. His frequent changes of position are probably explained in part by his convivial habits.
Quotes from others about the person
"He was, " writes a fellow journalist, F. J. Shepard, "the best all-around newspaper man I ever knew--could do anything on a newspaper better than anybody else. He was a cherubic person, nearly as broad as he was long, wrote a hand that was copperplate, was an excellent French scholar who reviewed Hugo's L'Art d'être Grandpère within twenty-four hours of its reception with long extracts in English verse. "
His wife was Frances E. Barrett, whom Lanigan married in 1866, and by whom he had two sons and two daughters.