Background
Goodrich, Samuel Griswold was born on August 19, 1793 in Ridgefield, Connecticut, United States. Son of Review Samuel and Elizabeth (Ely) Goodrich.
Goodrich, Samuel Griswold was born on August 19, 1793 in Ridgefield, Connecticut, United States. Son of Review Samuel and Elizabeth (Ely) Goodrich.
Master of Arts (honorary), Williams College, 1836. Master of Arts (honorary), Yale, 1848.
Goodrich was largely self-educated, and became an assistant in a country store at Danbury, Connecticut, which he left in 1808, and later again at Hartford, Connecticut, until 1811. From 1816 to 1822 he was a bookseller and publisher in Hartford. He visited Europe from 1823 to 1824, and moved to Boston in 1826.
In 1833 he bought 45 acres (180,000 m2) in nearby Roxbury and built a home in what is now Jamaica Plain.
There he continued in the publishing business, and from 1828 to 1842 published an illustrated annual, The Token, to which he was a frequent contributor both in prose and verse. A selection from these contributions was published in 1841 under the title Sketches from a Students Window.
The Token also contained some of the earliest work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Maria Child. In 1841 he established Merry"s Museum, which he continued to edit till 1854.
His series, beginning in 1827 under the name of Peter Parley, embraced geography, biography, history, science and miscellaneous tales.
Of these he was the sole author of only a few, but in 1857 he wrote that he was the author and editor of about 170 volumes, and that about seven millions had been sold. An English writer, George Mogridge, also used the name Peter Parley, raising objections from Goodrich, who had the prior claim. In 1857 he published Recollections of a Lifetime, which contains a list both of the works of which he was the author or editor and of the spurious works published under his name.
By his writings and publications he amassed a large fortune.
At the end of his consulship, he was presented with a commemorative medal. He returned to America and, in 1859, he published Illustrated History of the Animal Kingdom.
He died in New York and was buried in Southbury, Connecticut where he lived for a short time. <> The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a collection of his papers.
Goodrich"s land in Jamaica Plain was subdivided into residential streets, among them Peter Parley Road, Parley Avenue and Parley Vale.
There is a street called Peter Parley Row in Berlin, Connecticut, presumably honoring the author"s Connecticut birthplace. There are two streets bearing his name in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Parley Road and Parley Lane. James Joyce mentions the name of Peter Parley in his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manitoba at the end of chapter I.
One room Schoolhouse in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was named after Peter Parley.
Served in War of 1812. Member Massachusetts Senate (Federalist), 1837-1839.
Married Adeline Bradley, 1818. Married second, Mary Boott, 1826.