From 1822 to 1824 he studied at the Tapping Reeve Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1824, with his cousin Charles Hendrickson, Stephens began his traveling career by visiting his Aunt Helena in the Illinois Territory, continuing on to Saint Louis and New Orleans and returning to New York in February 1825. He passed the bar in 1827. An ardent Jacksonian, he became known as the "pet speaker" of Tammany Hall. In the fall of 1834, struggling with a strep throat that was aggravated by his public speaking, he embarked on a tour of England, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland to regain his health.
"I have just arrived at this place, and I live to tell it": in his first published words one can sense the roguish, irreverent, self-mocking voice of the typical American with which Stephens captivated masses of readers. Charles Fenno Hoffman started Stephens's career as a travel writer by publishing his often outrageous April 1835 letters from Smyrna (today Izmir, Turkey), without Stephens's knowledge, as "Scenes in the Levant" in the American Monthly Magazine in October, November, and December 1835 and November 1836; the letters were later included verbatim in Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838).
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