Acknowledged as a leading American biographer of the nineteenth century, James Parton achieved both financial rewards and literary recognition. Parton set high standards for popular biography and utilized research techniques that provided useful examples to later biographers and historians. His books, especially his outstanding three-volume Life of Andrew Jackson, have commanded the attention of historians and biographers for more than a century and earned for Parton the sobriquet "father of modern American biography."

Farmers and millers of French Huguenot descent typified Parton's father's side of the family; his mother's parents were proprietors of a hotel in Canterbury, England, where Parton was born on 9 February 1822, to James and Ann Leach Parton. The family had seven children, three of whom died in infancy before Parton's father died in 1826. In 1827 Ann Parton took her two daughters and two sons and sought new opportunities in America.

Thus James Parton arrived in New...