(c) 2017 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

William Cullen Bryant

Cummington, Massachusetts 1794 - 1878, New York City

BiographyWilliam Cullen Bryant, (born Nov. 3, 1794, Cummington, Mass., U.S.—died June 12, 1878, New York
City), poet of nature, best remembered for “Thanatopsis,” and editor for 50 years of the New York
Evening Post.
A descendant of early Puritan immigrants, Bryant at 16
entered the sophomore class of Williams College. Because of
nances
and in hopes of attending Yale, he withdrew without
graduating. Unable to enter Yale, he studied law under private
guidance at Worthington and at Bridgewater and at 21 was
admitted to the bar. He spent nearly 10 years in Plaineld
and
at Great Barrington as an attorney, a calling for which he held
a lifelong aversion. At 26 Bryant married Frances Fairchild,
with whom he was happy until her death nearly half a century
later. In 1825 he moved to New York City to become coeditor of
the New York Review. He became an editor of the Evening
Post in 1827; in 1829 he became editor in chief and part owner
and continued in this position until his death. His careful
investment of his income made Bryant wealthy. He was an
active patron of the arts and letters.
The religious conservatism imposed on Bryant in childhood
found expression in pious doggerel; the political conservatism of his father stimulated “The
Embargo” (1808), in which the 13-year-old poet demanded the resignation of President Jefferson.
But in “Thanatopsis” (from the Greek “a view of death”), which he wrote when he was 17 and which
made him famous when it was published in The North American Review in 1817, he rejected
Puritan dogma for Deism; thereafter he was a Unitarian. Turning also from Federalism, he joined
the Democratic party and made the Post an organ of free trade, workingmen’s rights, free speech,
and abolition. Bryant was for a time a Free-Soiler and later one of the founders of the Republican
party. As a man of letters, Bryant securely established himself at the age of 27 with Poems (1821). In
his later years he devoted considerable time to translations.
Bryant will be remembered longest as the poet of his native Berkshire hills and streams in such
poems as “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl.

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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