Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was an American reformer, novelist, and poet, whose work was associated with the American Naturalist literary movement.
Background
Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was born on February 4, 1876 in Norfolk, Virginia, United States. She was the daughter of John Dalton Cleghorn and Sarah Chestnut Hawley. In 1877 the family moved to a small farm near Madison, Wisconsin; but John Cleghorn was not cut out for farming, and after five years he went into business in Minneapolis. Sarah's mother died when the girl was nine, and she and her younger brother were reared by two maiden aunts in Manchester. Cleghorn was to write lovingly of the people in this New England village and of its old houses, shops and offices, and cemetery, whose ponds made it the children's playground. Sojourns in Troy, where her father had moved after his wife's death, figured in her upbringing, as did annual three-month interludes in New York City, where she visited with Audubon cousins, granddaughters of the naturalist.
Education
Taught at home by her mother and then by her aunts, Cleghorn had no formal education until she entered the Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester, where she studied Latin and Greek and experimented with verse. After graduating in 1895, she attended Radcliffe College for one year but withdrew for financial reasons. About this time she met Dorothy Canfield (later Mrs. John R. Fisher); they became devoted friends.
Career
The "most sickening" event of Cleghorn's adolescence was her reading of "the burning alive of a Negro by his white neighbors somewhere in the South. " The brevity of the report and its inconspicuousness shook her confidence "in the New York Tribune and in America. " Disturbed to find the churches giving so little attention to the social unrest of the 1890's, she began to interest herself in labor problems and unionization. She had been writing short fiction for Elbert Hubbard's Philistine and other publications and had been contributing poetry to Scribner's, Harper's, and the Atlantic. She now turned to writing that expressed social concerns in the American Magazine. Increasingly an admirer of Eugene V. Debs, she joined the Socialist party in 1913 and felt ennobled by her affiliation with so active a political minority. Out of this experience came her most widely known verse. On a visit to South Carolina she observed young children at work in a cotton factory that stood at the edge of a golf course. Astounded by the juxtaposition of youthful mill hands and adult players, she wrote: The golf-links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And watch the men at play. After deciding against the expansion of her verse, she sent the quatrain to Franklin P. Adams, conductor of "The Conning Tower" column in the New York Tribune, where it appeared on January 23, 1915, en route to countless reproductions and a permanent place in American literature. One cause crowded another. Cleghorn's fervent belief that public ownership was better than unrestrained capitalism led to a friendship with the socialist leader Norman Thomas. She was a pacifist even before World War I. She worked within prisons for the rehabilitation of inmates, holding that punishment was not a corrective. She vigorously opposed social and political discrimination on the basis of race and sex. Cleghorn took her causes to the newspapers through short, pointed, and informed letters to the editor and was regularly cheered by the response of unknown but intensely interested readers. Cleghorn's life was simple. An intense interest in the workers' education movement led her in 1920 to begin teaching at the Brookwood Labor School, Katonah. From 1922 to 1929 she taught dramatics and English at the Manumit School, near Pawling. In 1929 she was substitute associate professor of English at Vassar. Her income from writing ranged from modest to nonexistent. Her first book, a novel, A Turnpike Lady (1907), she called "a kind of daguerreotype in print. " The book was praised by William Dean Howells and went into a second edition. Cleghorn was coauthor with Dorothy Canfield Fisher of Fellow Captains (1916), a collection of essays. Many of her poems appeared in Portraits and Protests (1917), divided into three categories: depictions of a disappearing New England way of life, expressions of mysticism, and 'burning poems, " such as "Comrade Jesus, " about the evils of society. Threescore (1936), her warmly reviewed autobiography, was adorned with many poems. The Seamless Robe, her last book, was published in 1945. In 1943 this disturber of the easy conscience moved to Philadelphia, where she died. Robert Frost called her a "saint. " What was important to her, he said, was "not to get hold of both ends, but of the right end. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
She was characterized The Spinster (1916) as "one-third fiction and two-thirds a slightly arranged autobiography. "
