Thomas Wentworth Higginson Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson--reformer, militant abolitionist, politician, religious radical, advocate of equality for blacks and women, speaker, literary critic, military man, and author of everything from sermons and essays on nature to history, biography, short stories, and a novel--was highly regarded by most of his contemporaries during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. He published more than five hundred titles in a variety of genres, including more articles in the Atlantic than anyone other than James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Yet, within fifty years after his death he had plummeted headlong into obscurity, all of his books out of print. In the late twentieth century he was perhaps best known as Emily Dickinson's "Preceptor," but with the new millennium, his book about his experience as leader of the first freed-slave regiment of the Civil War is gaining him new prominence and appreciation.

In many ways Higginson is a conundrum; he refuses to fit neatly into any convenient boxes.

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