After Helen married Edward Bisell Hunt, a lieutenant and eventually a major in the United States Army Corps of Engineers, on 28 October 1852 at the Mount Vernon Church in Boston, the young couple lived in Washington, D. C.; New Haven, Connecticut; and Newport, Rhode Island. She adapted with apparent ease to the transient life of the military, perhaps because she had become accustomed to moving from place to place since childhood, and for the rest of her life she was something of a restless traveler, never residing in a single place for very long. The Hunts' first child, born a year after their marriage, died in infancy of a brain tumor. After serving in several important Civil War battles, Major Hunt died in 1863 while testing one of his military inventions, a submarine explosive device. Two years later their second son died of diphtheria. Devastated and alone while recovering from these losses, Helen Hunt began to write. It was 1865, the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Gilded Age. Industrialization was transforming American culture, and women writing of children, home, and family values were reaching vast audiences in newspapers and magazines.
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