Fitz-Greene Halleck was one of the most popular and important American poets during the first half of the nineteenth century. A member of the Knickerbocker Group of New York, he was known as the American Byron because of his romantic and satirical (though often imitative) verse. Halleck's business was banking, but as a literary amateur he won such fame that on 15 May 1877, almost ten years after his death, a statue of him was unveiled in New York's Central Park during a ceremony attended by such luminaries as President Rutherford B. Hayes, William Tecumseh Sherman, and William Cullen Bryant.

Born on 8 July 1790, Fitz-Greene Halleck was one of three children of Israel Halleck and Mary Eliot Halleck of Guilford, Connecticut. The poet's paternal lineage stretches back through various Puritan, Royalist, and Quaker ancestors to Peter Hallock, who in 1640, tradition says, was one of the first Englishmen to settle the north...