Authors and Friends

Accounts of personal contacts with well-known authors. Chapters cover: Longfellow, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Celia Thaxter, Whittier, and Tennyson According to Wikipedia: "Annie Adams Fields (June 6, 1834 January 5, 1915) was a United States writer.... Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she was the second wife of the publisher and author James Thomas Fields, whom she married in 1854, and with whom she encouraged up and coming writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Freeman, and Emma Lazarus. She was equally at home with great and established figures including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose biography she fearlessly compiled. ...After Fields' husband died in 1881, she continued to occupy the center of Boston literary life. The hallmark of Fields' work is a sympathetic understanding of her friends, who happened to be the leading literary figures of her time. Her closest friend and lover was Sarah Orne Jewett, a novelist and story writer whom her husband had published in The Atlantic. Fields and Jewett were together for the rest of Jewett's life (Jewett died in 1909). The two were friends with many of the main literary figures of their time, including Willa Cather, Mary Ellen Chase, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alfred Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child and John Greenleaf Whittier. Fields was a forward-looking, philanthropic and multi-talented woman, who encouraged the talents of others even as she followed the good of the intellect. Although Fields often turns up in the pantheons of 19th century poetry, it is for her short sympathetic biographies that she is now remembered."