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Edward Everett Hale

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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EDWARD EVERETT HALE (1822-1909), American author, was born in Boston on the 3rd of April 1822, son of Nathan Hale (1784-1863), proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, and grandnephew of Nathan Hale, the martyr spy. He graduated from Harvard in 1839; was pastor of the church of the Unity, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1846-1856, and of the South Congregational (Unitarian) church, Boston, in 1856-1899; and in 1903 became chaplain of the United States Senate. He died at Roxbury (Boston), Massachusetts, on the 10th of June 5909. His forceful personality, organizing genius, and liberal practical theology, together with his deep interest in the anti-slavery movement (especially in Kansas), popular education (especially Chautauqua work), and the working-man's home, were active in raising the tone of American life for half a century. He was a constant and voluminous contributor to the newspapers and magazines. He was an assistant editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and edited the Christian Examiner, Old and New (which he assisted in founding in 5869; in 1875 it was merged in Scribner's Magazine), Lend a Hand (founded by him in 1886 and merged in the Charities Review in 1897), and the Lend a Hand Record; and he was the author or editor of more than sixty books - fiction, travel, sermons, biography and history.

He first came into notice as a writer in 1859, when he contributed the short story "My Double and How He Undid Me" to the Atlantic Monthly. He soon published in the same periodical other stories, the best known of which was "The Man Without a Country" (1863), which did much to strengthen the Union cause in the North, and in which, as in some of his other non-romantic tales, he employed a minute realism which has led his readers to suppose the narrative a record of fact. The two stories mentioned, and such others as "The Rag-Man and the Rag-Woman" and "The Skeleton in the Closet," gave him a prominent position among the short-story writers of America. The story Ten Times One is Ten (5870), with its hero Harry Wadsworth, and its motto, first enunciated in 5869 in his Lowell Institute lectures, "Look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand," led to the formation among young people of "Lend-a-Hand Clubs," "Look-up Legions" and "Harry Wadsworth Clubs." Out of the romantic Waldensian story In His Name (1873) there similarly grew several other organizations for religious work, such as "King's Daughters," and "King's Sons." Among his other books are Kansas and Nebraska (1854); The Ingham Papers (1869); His Level Best, and Other Stories (1870); Sybaris and Other Homes (1871); Philip Nolan's Friends (1876), his best-known novel, and a sequel to The Man Without a Country; The Kingdom of God (1880); Christmas at Narragansett (1885); East and West, a novel (1892); For Fifty Years (poems, 1893); Ralph Waldo Emerson (1899); We, the People (1903); Prayers Offered in the Senate of the United States (1904), and Tarry-at-Home Travels (1906). He edited Lingard's History of England (1853), and contributed to Winsor's Memorial History of Boston (1880-1881), and to his Narrative and Critical History of America (1886-1889). With his son, Edward Everett Hale, Jr., he published Franklin in France (2 vols., 1887-1888), based largely on original research. The most charming books of his later years were A New England Boyhood (1893), James Russell Lowell and His Friends (1899), and Memories of a Hundred Years (1902).

A uniform and revised edition of his principal writings, in ten volumes, appeared in 1899-1901.