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Six Fun Facts About Henry Adams

Henry Adams during his lifetime was known as a snob and a grouch. He was, after all, an Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents not known for their cheery dispositions — John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

Today, two things distinguish Henry Adams in the public mind, neither particularly fun.

He did a lot of this.

First, he commissioned a famous bronze sculpture known as Grief, which stands in a Washington, D.C., park. Second, he wrote an unusual autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

However, there’s a bit more to the 19^th-century historian and intellectual with the famous last name.

Henry Adams

Of his birth, Henry Adams commented, “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” He was born Feb. 16, 1838, the third son of Abigail Brooks Adams and Charles Francis Adams.

Young Adams had wealth, brains, prestige, social connections and the Adams pedigree. The Adams ancestry, however, could be a burden as well as a blessing. As Adams put it, your family considered you a failure if you didn’t get elected president of the United States.

Henry Adams

Henry Adams grew up in Boston with an 18^th century mindset that caused him bewilderment as railroads, steam engines and telegraphs proliferated. “He belonged to the eighteenth century,” he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “and the eighteenth century upset all his plans.”

After Harvard, he amused himself in Europe for a few years, ostensibly studying law. When his father won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1859, he insisted his son accompany him to Washington, D.C., as his personal secretary. There he had a front row seat to the unfolding drama of the Civil War.

President Lincoln then appointed the senior Adams as minister to England. Charles Francis successfully kept the British from siding with the Confederacy, at least openly during the Civil War.

Henry began his writing career in England. Over his lifetime, he edited the prestigious North American Review, taught at Harvard, published biographies and essays, wrote two novels and a nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administration. His autobiography, published after he died, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Modern Library called it the best English nonfiction book of the 20^th century. .

Henry Adams, Failure

Though Henry wrote about history, he didn’t shape it as an Adams should–at least he thought so.

He spent 12 years writing his history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Then he figured only three serious people read it.

Frontispiece to Adams’ autobiography

He called his life ‘a broken arch.’

Henry Adams suffered a stroke in 1912 shortly after the Titanic sank. He had tickets for the return voyage to Europe. For a while he could still write letters to family and friends, but finally on March 27, 1918, he died in Washington, D.C., age 80.

Here are some fun—well, maybe fun-ish — things to know about Henry Adams.

1. He Had a Little Club With Its Own Stationery and Tea Service. As an Adult.

While living in Washington, D.C., Henry Adams and his wife Marion Hooper “Clover” Adam,s formed an intense friendship with Clarence King and Clara and John Hay. King, a geologist, had brains, drive and a secret African-American wife in New York City. Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s biographer, would become secretary of state for Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt.

John Hay, by John singer Sargent

Adams met Hay in Washington in 1861, when he served as his father’s personal secretary and Hay as Lincoln’s. Adams then introduced King to the rest of the group after meeting him in 1871. They gathered frequently at the Adams’ home after they moved to Washington in 1877, and remained close for the rest of their lives. Adams was so close to Hay that they built adjoining houses near the White House, the site of the Hay-Adams Hotel. In 1881, they decided to call themselves the Five of Hearts. All were about 40, except 32-year-old Clara Hay.

Clara Stone Hay

John Hay had stationery printed with a five of hearts monogram, which the club used to write to each other. King had a tea service made with the same motif and a clock face showing 5 p.m., when Clover served tea to the group.

Clarence King

Among the five, though, they had plenty of other friends – the most famous people of their age. Their circle included Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitmen, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Henry Hobson Richardson, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, every president from Lincoln to Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie.

2. He Left His Wife Out of His Autobiography.

Clover Adams committed suicide on Dec. 6, 1885 by drinking chemicals she used to develop photographs. Henry had married her at her father’s home in Beverly Farms, Mass., on June 27, 1872. He said he was wildly in love with her.

Clover Adams. Few photographs of her survive.

In the 467-page Education of Henry Adams, he didn’t once mention Clover. He also omitted the 12-1/2 years of his marriage from the book. Her death, he wrote, “smashed the life out of him.” Before she died, he had remained fairly stationary, but afterward he traveled extensively, to Japan, Hawaii, the South Seas, Mexico, Egypt, Britain, Cuba and Europe.

He commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a bronze sculpture of a draped figure to mark her grave in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. He urged Saint-Gaudens to use Buddhist devotional art as inspiration. The statue portrayed nirvana, a state of existence beyond joy and sorrow.

Adams Monument. Henry is buried beside Clover.

It was meant to ask a question, not to give an answer, wrote Adams.

The sculpture became a tourist attraction, and people call it “Grief.” Adams hated the name, officially known as the “Adams Memorial.”

3. He Didn’t Think Much of Harvard.

His life, he wrote, was “a search for education the schools cannot give.’

He went to Harvard, he wrote in his autobiography, because his family always had. None of them, he wrote, ‘had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it.’

He also wrote the college offered ‘chiefly advantages vulgarly called social, rather than mental.’

Henry Adams upon his graduation from Harvard.

“Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously,” he wrote.

But when Adams was 32, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot invited him to teach medieval history, about which he called himself ‘utterly and grossly ignorant.’ Adams took the job, though, and for six years taught a survey course of European history from the 10^th century to the 16^th.

4. He Had an Unrequited Love Affair for 35 Years.

Henry Adams met the beautiful Elizabeth Sherman Cameron in 1881, nearly five years before Clover committed suicide. A captivating hostess who read widely, she had a miserable marriage to a wealthy alcoholic U.S. senator. “Lizzie” led Adams on for 35 years, while flirting with Russian Prince Orloff, poet Joseph Trumbull Stickney, the sculptors Saint-Gaudens and Rodin and even John Hay.

Elizabeth Cameron Sherman

Did they ever consummate the relationship, which, according to their 35-years of letters, was mostly Platonic? Only they knew for sure. However, their friendship—or whatever it was—inspired plenty of gossip in their social circles.

When Henry suffered his stroke in 1912, Lizzie insisted on taking care of him. Henry’s sister Mary said no. “I won’t have her,” she said. Mary had concerns about the ‘disagreeable scandal’ and didn’t want tongues wagging about Lizzie coming from Paris to take charge of her brother’s care.

5. He Secretly Wrote a Best Selling Novel.

In 1880, Adams published a book called Democracy: An American Novel. An immediate best-seller, it prompted speculation about who wrote it and on whom did the author base his characters.

People thought maybe Adams’ friends, John Hay and Clarence King, wrote it. Or perhaps Clover Adams did it. Not until after his death in 1918 did his publishing company reveal he had written it.

Henry Adams playing with his dog.

Democracy tells the story of a ‘rather fast New York girl’ named Madeleine Lee who goes to Washington. She establishes a salon that attracts powerful men, and two fall in love with her. Each connives to get rid of his rival while the Bulgarian minister watches their machinations.

More than a century later, a Washington Post writer in 2005 gave it a positive review. “Democracy” is a joy — a worldly, profoundly knowing (and thus profoundly disenchanted), deliciously elitist social comedy…” The reason for the review: The Washington National Opera had performed an opera based on Adams’ novel in 2005.

Adams wrote his next novel, Esther, under a pseudonym, Frances Compton Snow. it didn’t sell too well.

6. He Believed Ulysses S. Grant Ruined His Life.

He moved to Washington in 1868 after working as his father’s secretary – and as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Boston Advertiser, as well as a contributor to the North American Review.

He prepared to make his mark in Washington as a political journalist. Full of ambition and conceit, he thought, perhaps, Ulysses S. Grant might tap him as an adviser when elected president of the United States in 1868. Some of his family friends already served in high office.

It didn’t happen. Young Henry Adams failed to win the right friends and influence the right people in the capital. He rubbed some people the wrong way. Invited to a White House dinner in 1870, he gave his own performance a glowing review. “I chattered with that blandness for which I am so justly distinguished,” he wrote, “and I flatter myself it was I who showed them how they ought to behave.” Well, not really.

Grant had no use for the Adams family.

President Grant

He failed to appoint Adams’ families friends to his Cabinet and cashiered others. He told his secretary the Adamses ‘did not possess one noble trait of character.’

“My family is buried politically beyond recovery for years. I am becoming more and more isolated as far as allies go,” wrote Henry Adams.

When Grant died, Adams offered up a bitter epitaph: “He had no right to exist.”

With thanks to The Education of Henry Adams by Carl Becker in the American Historical Review, April 1919 and Henry Adams and the Age of Grant by Brooks D. Simpson in the Hayes Historical Journal 1989. There’s a recent biography of Henry Adams called “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams” by David S. Brown. You can help independent bookstores and the New England Historical Society by buying it here. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Hersey Tells the Truth About Hiroshima

After the Aug. 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, the U.S. government censored the truth about the terrible carnage the atomic explosion wrought. John Hersey, a 32-year-old war correspondent, told the truth about it.

Bomb blast minutes after it went off over Hiroshima.

Hersey wrote 31,000 words that described in detail the effects of nuclear warfare on survivors. His editor at the New Yorker magazine decided to devote its entire Aug. 31, 1946 issue to it, something never done before or since. Roger Angell, a New Yorker editor, wrote that Hersey’s prose was “so stripped of mannerism, sentimentality, and even minimal emphasis as to place each reader alone within scenes laid bare of all but pain.”

In 1999, the 36 members of New York University judged Hiroshima the finest piece of American journalism in the 20th century.

John Hersey

He was born June 17, 1914, the son of staunch Congregationalist parents, Grace Baird and Roscoe Hersey. They were so staunch they became YMCA missionaries to China, and John was born in Tientsin. He only spoke English as a second language. He learned to speak Chinese first.

His family came from old Puritan stock. His ancestor William Hersey settled Hingham, Mass., in 1635, along with a few others that included Abraham Lincoln’s ancestor.

John Hersey

At the age of 10, John Hersey returned to the United States, attending public school in New York and then the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. From there he went on to Yale, where he joined Skull and Bones and lettered in football. He then did graduate studies at Cambridge University. Soon afterward, he got a job working as a Time correspondent. In 1940, he went to the magazine’s Chongqing bureau then covered the fighting in Europe and Asia for Newsweek.

In the winter of 1945-46, Hersey reported on the reconstruction of Japan for the New Yorker. While in Japan, he read a reprint of the journal of a German missionary who survived the bombing in Time magazine. Hersey visited the missionary, who introduced him to others.

Six Survivors of Hiroshima

Those six survivors formed the nucleus of Hiroshima.

The book famously begins with the activities of those six characters when the bomb went off at exactly 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.

Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her desk and was turning her head to speak to the woman who sat next to her.

Hiroshima after the bombing

Dr. Masakazu Fujjii was sitting down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood at her kitchen window watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit, lay in his underwear on a cot on the third floor of his order’s three-story mission house reading a magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital, walked down one of the hospital corridors carrying a blood specimen for a Wassermann test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Hiroshima Methodist Church pastor, paused at the door of a rich man’s suburban house with a handcart full of things he had evacuated in fear of the bombing raid everyone expected.

A Sensation

Hersey described the bomb as a ‘tremendous flash of light cut across the sky’ that seemed like a ‘sheet of sun.’

“A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors,” wrote Hersey. “They still wonder why they lived when so many others died.”

In less than two years, the book had been reprinted in 80 periodical publications, translated into 11 languages and sold more than 600,000 copies.

Hiroshima in October 1945

“Its 31,000 words suffice because they abstain from the smallest judgment or moral positioning, and leave the reader to deal with the consequences and the questions,” wrote Angell. The restrained flow of his words, his characters’ conversations and the burnt-out city made it feel like an ancient tragedy, he wrote.

Unmatchable

“The achievement was unmatchable. Could he ever again write anything quite like it? “The puritan in Hersey told him not only that he couldn’t but also that he shouldn’t, or not with the same ease,” wrote his biographer, Jeremy Treglown.

Hersey went on to considerable achievement. He wrote two dozen books and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel A Bell for Adano, along with many other journalism prizes. He taught at Yale and served as master of one of its residential houses.

For many years, he lived on Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard. He married an ex-girlfriend of John F. Kennedy, Frances Ann Cannon. Over dinner in New York, Kennedy told Hersey the story of how his PT boat sank. Hersey wrote it for the New Yorker, later used as campaign literature for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

His second wife, Barbara Day, was the ex-wife of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. They had a summer home in Key West, which they shared with his friend Ralph Ellison. John Hersey died there on March 24, 1993.

Aftermath of Hiroshima

In 1985, Hersey wrote a follow-up to Hiroshima, again for the New Yorker. In it, he wrote,

“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory.”

With thanks to This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell and Mr. Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima by Jeremy Treglown. This story was updated in 2022.

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Charles Ives’ New England Holidays, A Danbury Childhood Set to Music

Charles Ives never forgot the sights and sounds of the village cornet band marching to the cemetery in Danbury, Conn., on Decoration Day. His father, George Ives, had served as a bandmaster in the Union Army and led the town bands after the Civil War.

Charles was born in 1874, soon enough after the war to understand the pain and loss the town still felt. He lived a typical life for a boy from a prominent old New England family. He starred on the baseball diamond, graduated from Yale, married, played the organ in church on Sunday and got rich on Wall Street.

But he led an unconventional life at night and on weekends. Charles Ives composed avant-garde orchestral music, much of which evoked the memories of his boyhood. He revived those early Decoration Days in the second movement of his symphony, New England Holidays, which also included Washington’s Birthday, Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

Charles ives

Ives’ colleagues knew him as a successful insurance man and were surprised to learn he composed music. No one performed his orchestral music until late in his life. He didn’t care; he wrote what he wanted to write without worrying what his listeners thought. His compositions had dissonance and complexity, wild noises and what conductor Michael Tilson Thomas called ‘confrontational crunches.’

Charles Ives’ Decoration Day

He worked on New England Holidays for years, even decades for the last movement, Thanksgiving.

The Danbury of Charles Ives’ youth.

Ives used hymns, folk songs, marching bands, country fiddlers, a blacksmith’s hammer, church bells and fireworks to paint a musical picture of perfect childhood days. In Decoration Day he evokes the overgrown lilacs in front of the homes abandoned by Civil War soldiers and the sounds of the cornet band. Ives explained what he was getting at with Decoration Day in a written preface to the musical score:

[1]In the early morning the gardens and woods about the village are the meeting places of those who, with tender memories and devoted hand, gather the flowers for the Day’s Memorial…

[2]After the Town Hall is filled with the spring’s harvest of lilacs, daisies and peonies, the parade s slowly formed on Main Street. First came the three Marshalls on Plough horses (going sideways); then the Warden and Burgesses in carriages, the Village Cornet Band, the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) two by two, the Militia…the inevitable swarm of small boys following.

[3] The march to Wooster Cemetery is a thing a boy never forgets. The roll of muffled drums and “Adeste Fidelis” answer for the dirge. A little girl on the fence post waves to her father and wonders if he looked like that at Gettysburg.

[4] After the last grave is decorated, “Taps” sound out through the pines and hickories, while a last hymn is sung.

[5] When the ranks are formed again and “We all march back to Town” to a Yankee stimulant–Reeves’ inspiring “Second Regiment Quick-Step” — though to many a soldier, the somber thoughts of the day, underlie the tunes of the band.

[6] The march stops — and in the silence, the shadow of the early morning flower-song rises over the Town and the sunset behind West Mountain breathes its benediction upon the Day.”

Charles Ives

Charles Ives was born to a prominent Danbury family on Oct. 20, 1874. His family home, built in 1780, held several generations of Iveses. George Ives, his father, helped found the Savings Bank of Danbury and the Danbury and Norwalk Railroad, now a branch of Metro-North’s New Haven Line.

Charles Ives, left, baseball star

Charles played drums in his father’s marching band in Danbury. George liked to experiment with music. He used to direct two bands to march toward each other playing different songs. He also made his son sing well-known songs while he played something different in a different key. Those experiments would appear later in the work of Charles Ives.

A Conventional Life

His father’s unconventional approach to music were perhaps the only indication Charles Ives would become a path-breaking composer of music. His life did not defy convention.

He composed Symphony No. 1 for his senior thesis at Yale, but his advisor’s reaction convinced him he couldn’t make a living writing the kind of music he wanted to. So he went to work for an insurance company, and eventually founded a successful insurance agency. In 1908, he married Harmony Twichell, whose father had a close friendship with Mark Twain.

Young Charles Ives

His choice of a wife with the first name Harmony seems especially apt. So is the fact that she presided as president of the Mark Twain Society. Ives championed ordinary people over elites in his music, in his memory and in his politics.

He once proposed a Constitutional amendment that would allow citizens to propose bills in Congress. Each year, Congress would pick 10 proposals and put them to a national ballot referendum. Ives printed a pamphlet about the plan and sent it to the 1920 Republican National Convention, but it arrived too late.

By then, Charles Ives had already had his first heart attack during World War I. An argument with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, triggered the attack. Ives had suggested financing the war effort with war bonds as low as $50. Roosevelt “scorned the idea of anything so useless as a $50 bond,” but later came around to the idea.

Musical Legacy

He bought a camp in Redding, Conn., which he eventually expanded into a home and studio. There he could retreat for the weekends composing his music, which he didn’t expect to be played in public.

Ives composed prolifically, especially from 1907-1918. Then one day in 1927 he came downstairs with tears in his eyes and told Harmony he couldn’t write music anymore. “It just doesn’t sound right,” he told her. He continued to revise his music, however. He worked on Thanksgiving, the final movement of New England Holidays, for 30 years.

Ives also secretly financed the careers of up-and-coming composers as Lou Harrison and Nicolas Slonimsky. In 1931 and 1932, Slominsky conducted the first three movements of New England Holidays.

In 1947, Charles Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting. He didn’t care, calling prizes ‘badges of mediocrity.’ He gave away his prize money, saying, “Prizes are for boys and I’m a grown-up person.”

Leonard Bernstein, who called Ives the greatest American composer, premiered Ives’ Symphony No. 2 in 1951. Ives heard it over the radio.

Charles Ives’ boyhood home

Ives moved around, but often returned to his family home for gatherings. As Danbury grew from a town to a city, commercial buildings and their clutter grew around the Ives house. The Danbury Museum and Historical Society now owns the house, which it is trying to restore as a museum.

Charles Ives died on May 19, 1954.

To see a documentary about Charles Ives and New England Holidays, click here. With thanks to Music of the First World War by Don Tyler

Album cover of Charles Ives, CC by 2.0. Charles Ives’ house By Daniel Case – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11377562. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Battle Behind The Battle Hymn of the Republic

The Battle Hymn of the Republic gave Julia Ward Howe something she wanted that her husband didn’t want her to have: Fame.

Julia Ward Howe by John Elliott

Julia Ward Howe

She was a bit of a diva, the pretty, pampered daughter of wealthy New Yorkers. Julia Ward was the fourth of seven children born to Samuel Ward III and Julia Rush Cutler on May 27, 1819. She was smart, well educated and ambitious.

Visiting Boston in 1841, she met the dashing Samuel Gridley Howe, 18 years her senior. His nickname was “Chevalier,” or “Chev,” as he had followed Lord Byron to Greece to fight for Greek independence. He then became a physician, worked for Polish relief, took part in the July Revolution in Paris and founded the Perkins School for the Blind in South Boston.

Samuel Gridley Howe

They married in 1843. After a European honeymoon, Samuel expected Julia to devote herself to him, to their children and to their home. She did not. Already a published author by the time they married, she wanted to continue to write.

The two fought bitterly during their marriage over her desire to have a life outside the home. Having six children only made her more eager to have a public life. They separated in 1852, but then reconciled.

In 1861, Samuel Gridley Howe served as a director of the Sanitary Commission. It cared for the war wounded and tried to prevent disease in Union camps. In November of that year, he and Julia visited federal troops in Washington, D.C. They traveled with Massachusetts Gov. John A. Andrew and their pastor, James Freeman Clarke.

John Brown’s Body

One day in Washington a review of the troops was planned for Julia, her pastor and their friends Mr. and Mrs. Edwin P. Whipple. But the review was canceled before they arrived, because a skirmish with the enemy broke out. On their return to the hotel, marching regiments delayed their carriage. To relieve the tedium of the slow carriage ride, they began to sing John Brown’s Body. The marching soldiers shouted, “Good for you!” and took up the chorus.

Clarke said to Julia, “Why do you not write some good words for that stirring tune?” She said she’d been thinking about it.

Julia Ward Howe went to bed that night at the Willard Hotel. Suddenly she awoke in the early dawn with the words running through her head. She grabbed a pencil and Sanitary Commission stationery, wrote the lyrics and then went back to sleep.

Libby Prison, 1865

The Battle Hymn of the Republic was published anonymously in The Atlantic on Feb. 1, 1862. The publisher, James T. Fields, suggested the title, and Julia had made some changes. She was paid $5.

Overnight Success

She had no idea of its instant success, according to the biography written by her daughters, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, Volume 1.

It was sung, chanted, recited, and used in exhortation and prayer on the eve of battle.’ It was printed in newspapers, in army hymn-books, on broadsides; it was the word of the hour, and the Union armies marched to its swing.”

Chaplain McCabe, the fighting chaplain of the 122^nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, memorized the lyrics the first time he read them before getting up from his chair. He was later incarcerated in the Confederacy’s notorious Libby Prison with hundreds of northern soldiers. When the prisoners got word of the Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg, McCabe led them in the Battle Hymn. Wrote Howe’s daughters:

“Every voice took up the chorus, and Libby Prison rang with the shout of ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah!’”

McCabe later told that story in Washington, and ended by singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic once again:

Julia Ward howe at 90

“The effect was magical: people shouted, wept and sang, all together; and when the song was ended, above the tumult of applause was heard the voice of Abraham Lincoln, exclaiming, while the tears rolled down his cheeks, —

“Sing it again!”

Julia Ward Howe, Besieged

Julia Ward Howe was then besieged by requests for autographed copies of the Battle Hymn of the Republic until her death. The song put her in the public eye, and she took full advantage of it. She then published a literary magazine and accounts of her travels to Europe. By 1868, Samuel Gridley Howe no longer opposed her public appearances.

She became a pacifist and a suffragist, continuing to write and lecturing and touring widely. Then when he died in 1876, she was further freed to lead a public — and famous — life.

Julia Ward Howe died on Oct. 17, 1910, at her home, Oak Glen, in Portsmouth, R.I. At her memorial service 4,000 people sang Battle Hymn of the Republic. Her daughters’ biography of her won the Pulitzer Prize in 1915.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Fun Facts About Amy Lowell, Cigar-Smoking Brahmin Poet

Amy Lowell was a poet, an heiress, a Brahmin, a diva, a lesbian and savior of the Boston Athenaeum. Though born into two wealthy Boston families, her size and her eccentricity invited controversy and ridicule.

Unmarried and unmoored for the first few decades of her life, she published her first poem at the age of 36 in the Atlantic Monthly. From there she went on to influence the course of poetry by publishing 650 of her own poems, lecturing, critiquing and editing anthologies of work by such writers as H.D., Ezra Pound, John Gould Fletcher, D.H. Lawrence and Richard Aldington.

Amy Lowell. Photo courtesy New York Public Library

She also used her money and her connections to boost the careers of young poets like Carl Sandburg. She gave them feedback, recommended their work, introduced them to editors and wrote articles about them. T.S. Eliot called her “the demon saleswoman” of modern poetry.

“God made me a businesswoman, and I made myself a poet,” she once said.

Here are six fun facts about the forceful woman who freed herself from the restrictions of an aristocratic upbringing.

1. Amy Lowell was an heiress to two textile fortunes.

Lowell coat of arms

She was born Feb. 9, 1874 into the Lawrence and Lowell families. Her paternal grandfather, John Amory Lowell, and her maternal grandfather, Abbott Lawrence, amassed fortunes by developing textile mills in cities named after them –Lawrence and Lowell, Mass.

Amy’s father, Augustus Lowell, served as a U.S. congressman and ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Her brothers both achieved distinction. Percival, an astronomer 20 years Amy’s senior, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. Abbott Lawrence served as president of Harvard for 24 years. Her sister, Elizabeth, worked to promote prenatal care.

Relatives included ministers, judges, industrialists, philanthropists, Civil War heroes and writers, including, of course, her nephew Robert Lowell and her cousin James Russell Lowell.

2. She did what she pleased (after a while).

Amy was wealthy, independent and obese, the result of a glandular problem that developed in her teens. Her weight ruined her debut and she didn’t find a husband. Her parents wouldn’t let her attend college, believing it unseemly for a Lowell girl. She compensated by reading voraciously.

Amy Lowell, child of privilege

By 1901, Amy was an unmarried, gay, eccentric woman. She slept all day and went to the opera, theatre or dinner parties in the evening. Afterward she would work until dawn reading and writing. She entertained frequently at her Brookline estate, her satin gown and jewels accentuating her cigar, her pince-nez and her hair gathered in a bun. Her butler gave dinner guests bath towels to protect them from her “children” – seven sheepdogs.

When she traveled by rail, she would ask for a hammer if her sleeping car was too stuffy. Then she’d smash the glass and tell the conductor to send her the bill. Hotels were instructed to put 16 pillows on her bed, shroud the mirrors in black and stop all clocks in her room because she liked quiet.

3. She saved the Boston Athenaeum.

Amy found solace in the quiet old Boston Athenaeum, which her great-great-grandfather helped found in 1807. The board of trustees wanted to sell the old building and move to newly fashionable Arlington Street in Back Bay.

Amy despised noisy Arlington Street and the dreary new building design proposed for it.

The Boston Athenaeum today

Amy Lowell and her friend Elizabeth Ward Perkins began a campaign to preserve the old building. One bold tactic was to run for two of the 15 seats on the Boston Athenaeum’s board of trustees. Both women lost the election, but her brother Lawrence won the seat.

Lawrence Lowell by John Singer Sargent

They also won a motion passed to postpone action on the move. An angry William Sloan Kennedy then wrote to the Boston Evening Transcript complaining “two ladies had discourteously defeated two years’ unremunerated labor of the self-sacrificing trustees who had worked on plans for removal.”

She had two voting shares in the Athenaeum and bought another one. She also drafted a circular denouncing the proposed sale and persuaded three proprietors to sign it. It cited Augustus St. Gaudens’ praise of the façade and pleaded, “Let us preserve this old-time library, its atmosphere, traditions, associations, its quiet and peaceful outlook.”

The Boston Athenaeum in 1855

The members took a postcard vote. When the ballots came in, 349 stockholders voted to stay, 284 to move. Amy Lowell had carried the day.

4. Amy Lowell marketed poetry like a product.

Amy Lowell started to write poetry rather late in life, publishing her first poem when in her 30s. She threw herself into the new Imagist style and fiercely supported the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Pound didn’t always appreciate her help.

Her goal, she wrote, was to “produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” Eventually she developed a style called “polyphonic prose,” which combined free forms and formal verse.

But first she marketed poetry. “Publicity first. Poetry will follow,” she once said. And she indefatigably promoted the new poetry on the lecture circuit, ordering audiences to clap or hiss, but at least to “do something.”

She earned such celebrity that letters addressed to “Amy Lowell, Poet, Boston,” reached her.

Amy Lowell on the cover of Time magazine, 1925

5. She had a secret Boston marriage.

In 1912, she fell in love with an actress, Ada Dwyer Russell, who played theaters on Broadway, in London and in Boston. Russell had a daughter, Lorna, from her short-lived marriage two decades earlier. She moved in with Amy Lowell in 1914, though they kept their relationship on the downlow.

Ada Dwyer Russell

Her biographers don’t know much about the relationship. Amy called Ada “Peter” and “the lady of the moon.” She treated her daughter as her own and wrote love poems to her, like Taxi:

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.

6. John Keats probably killed her.

Amy Lowell had a passionate interest in the English Romantic poet John Keats, and collected his letters through much of her life.

In her late 40s, she threw herself into writing a 1300-page, two-volume biography of the poet. The effort exhausted her and caused severe eyestrain. On May 12, 1925, shortly after the book was published, she looked into the mirror and saw the right side of her face sag. A half hour later she was dead from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Winfield Townley Scott, a poet and book reviewer, wrote that the work of writing the biography almost certainly killed her.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously the next year.

With thanks to the essay Poet, Boston, by Laurie Hillyer, from Mad and Magnificent Yankees for this article. Image of the Boston Athenaeum CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=722802. Lowell coat of arms By Glasshouse – New England Historic Genealogical Society. A Roll of Arms. 9 vols. Boston, 1928-1980, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99810038. This story last updated in 2022.

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