Charles Fenno Hoffman

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Charles Fenno Hoffman
Charles Fenno Hoffman

Charles Fenno Hoffman (February 7, 1806 New York City – June 7, 1884 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) was an American author and poet. When 11 years old, his leg was crushed by a boating accident and had to be amputated, but he was not deterred thereby from athletics and an open-air life.

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[edit] Biography

He was the son of New York State Attorney General Josiah Ogden Hoffman and Maria Fenno Hoffman (1781-1823, daughter of John Fenno). He attended New York University and Columbia College. He was admitted to the bar at 21, though he practiced law only intermittently.

In 1833 he led a group of other students in the Eucleian Society in establishing the Knickerbocker Magazine, which he edited for the first three issues before passing duties on to Lewis Gaylord Clark.[1] In 1836, Park Benjamin, Sr. merged his New England Monthly Magazine with the American Monthly and hired Hoffman as editor, though he left to join the New York Mirror a year later.[2]

Hoffman's first book was A Winter in the Far West (1835), recounting his travels as far west as St. Louis, Missouri.[3] It was followed by Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie (1837) based on actual experiences in search of health. He wrote a successful novel, Greyslaer (1840),[4] based on the murder of Colonel Solomon P. Sharp by Jereboam O. Beauchamp, known as the Beauchamp-Sharp Tragedy—an event that several writers, including Thomas Holley Chivers and William Gilmore Simms, also fictionalized.[5]

Hoffman's fame rested chiefly upon his poems, first collected in The Vigil of Faith (1842). Literary critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold that year dedicated twice as much space to Hoffman than any other author in his respected anthology The Poets and Poetry of America.[6] Griswold helped Hoffman publish The Echo, another collection of poetry, in 1844.[7] Hoffman was also popular for his his songs. From a devoutly Lutheran family he nevertheless dealt with religious ideas in his writing from an inquisitive and open viewpoint. He became the editor of The New-York Book of Poetry, which first attributed A Visit From St. Nicholas to Clement Clarke Moore. He remained a successful editor and author throughout the 1840s.

[edit] Insanity

Under the strain of work, he went insane in 1849,[8] supposedly after a servant used his manuscripts to start a fire. He was hospitalized and released in April 1849 and accepted a position with the Department of State in Washington, D.C. By autumn, however, he was declared permanently insane.[9] He spent the last 35 years of his life in the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, (now part of Columbia University) and then a state asylum in Pennsylvania.

[edit] References

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  1. ^ Pattee, Fred Lewis. The First Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966. p. 493
  2. ^ Bayless, Joy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1943. p. 28
  3. ^ Pattee, Fred Lewis. The First Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966. p. 493
  4. ^ Pattee, Fred Lewis. The First Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966. p. 493
  5. ^ Whited, Stephen R. (2002). "Kentucky Tragedy", in Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan: The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Associate Editor: Todd W. Taylor, LSU Press, pp. 404–405. ISBN 0807126926. Retrieved on 2008-01-24. 
  6. ^ Pattee, Fred Lewis. The First Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966. p. 494
  7. ^ Bayless, Joy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1943. p. 276
  8. ^ Pattee, Fred Lewis. The First Century of American Literature: 1770–1870. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966. p. 494
  9. ^ Bayless, Joy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold: Poe's Literary Executor. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1943. p. 149

This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J.M. Dent & sons; New York, E.P. Dutton.

[edit] Sources

  • [1] Hoffman genealogy, at the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan
  • [2] Fenno-Hoffman bio info, at the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan
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