John Townsend Trowbridge was born two years after the
opening of the Erie Canal and died during the First World
War. The friend of Longfellow and Holmes and Whitman (at a
time when Longfellow and Holmes refused to meet the author
of Leaves of Grass), he wrote gouts of poems, a string of
popular plays, and at least forty novels, including more
than one bestseller. Having started with hack work in New
York, with hack work he continued, growing so impoverished
in the Grub Street of the day that at one point he took to
the business of engraving gold pencil-cases.

The literary odd-job man, who turns his hand to whatever a
hand can be turned, has long been nearly extinct (perhaps
the sole example remaining, like a last elegant dodo, is
John Updike). From such a writer, poems and stories and
plays and novels come, now like a freshet, now like a
flood—many of them bad, or bad enough, some of them good, or
good enough, and perhaps in a life one or two with the flare
of brilliance.

Born in a cabin in the wilderness west of Rochester, which
was soon to be a boomtown, Trowbridge grew up a plodder, a
dull student who all his life suffered from chronic
eye-inflammation. He might have become a hardscrabble
farmer like his father had he not been shocked into
curiosity at about fourteen by a list of “foreign words and
phrases” in the back of his