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Josiah Gilbert Holland

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND (1819-1881), American author and editor, was born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on the 24th of July 1819. He graduated in 1843 at the Berkshire Medical College (no longer in existence) at Pittsfield, Mass., and after practising medicine in 1844-1847, and making an unsuccessful attempt, with Charles Robinson (1818-1894), later first governor of the state of Kansas, to establish a hospital for women, he taught for a brief period in Richmond, Virginia, and in 1848 was superintendent of schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In 1849 he became assistant editor under Samuel Bowles, and three years later one of the owners, of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, with which he retained his connexion until 1867. He then travelled for some time in Europe, and in 1870 removed to New York, where he helped to establish and became editor and one-third owner of Scribner' s Monthly (the title of which was changed in 1881 to The Century ), which absorbed the periodicals Hours at Home, Putnam's Magazine and the Riverside Magazine. He remained editor of this magazine until his death. Dr Holland's books long enjoyed a wide popularity. The earlier ones were published over the pseudonym "Timothy Titcomb." His writings fall into four classes: history and biography, represented by a History of Western Massachusetts (1855), and a Life of Abraham Lincoln (1865); fiction, of which Miss Gilbert's Career (1860) and The Story of Sevenoaks (1875) remain faithful pictures of village life in eastern United States; poetry, of which Bitter-Sweet (1858) and Kathrina, Her Life and Mine (1867) were widely read; and a series of homely essays on the art of living, of which the most characteristic were Letters to Young People, Single and .Married (1858), Gold Foil, hammered from Popular Proverbs (1859), Letters to the Jonses (1863), and Every-Day Topics (2 series, 1876 and 1882). While a resident of New York, where he died on the 12th of October 1881, he identified himself with measures for good government and school reform, and in 1872 became a member and for a short time in 1873 was president of the Board of Education.

See Mrs H. M. Plunkett's Josiah Gilbert Holland (New York, 1894).