Gamaliel Bradford

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Gamaliel Bradford

Gamaliel Bradford (born October 9, 1863 in Boston , † April 11, 1932 in Wellesley ) was an American writer. He was particularly known as a biographer ; Using a method that he himself called “psychography”, he attempted to depict their “ soul ” in short portraits of historical personalities .

life and work

Bradford came from a long-established New England family that goes back to the "pilgrim father" William Bradford (colonial governor) and was the sixth generation of the first-born son, who was baptized with the name Gamaliel. His father, Gamaliel Bradford V, was a successful banker and publicist, and his mother, Clara Crowninshield Kinsman, died of tuberculosis in 1865. Bradford and his younger brother (who died when he was just nine years old) grew up with their aunt Sarah Hickling Bradford in Wellesley Hills. Bradford, shy as a child and of a weak constitution, received his education from the private teacher ML Perrin. In 1882 he began studying at Harvard University , but dropped out after a few months and returned to Wellesley, where he was taught another three years with Perrin. He then tried his hand at business for a short time and worked in his father's bank, but soon decided to pursue a career as a writer. In 1886 he married his childhood friend Helen Hubbard Ford, with whom he lived in Wellesley until his death.

Bradford initially tried his hand at essayist with moderate success; his first volume, Types of American Character , appeared in 1895. The volume received just as little attention as his first volume of poetry, which appeared nine years later. Between 1904 and 1908 he published three novels at the renowned publishing house Houghton Mifflin, which also met with little response, so that no publisher could be found for his subsequent novels.

Finally, Bradford turned to biography and published a character study by Confederate General Robert E. Lee , which was particularly well received in the southern states; no fewer than three southern universities ( Washington University and Lee University in 1912, and Wake Forest College seven years later ) awarded him an honorary doctorate for the book. Bradford quickly added two volumes of brief portraits of other southern and then northern military men. Here Bradford found the form that determined his extensive work up to his death. His biographical sketches, which were first published individually in magazines and then collectively in book form, do not represent résumés from cradle to grave, but are a peculiar mixture of anecdotes and quotations that Bradford considered so significant that he decided from them Character , if not thought to read out the soul of his subject. He himself described his method as "psychography"; in a volume published in 1917 he described himself as a “naturalist of souls,” who, like a scientist, describes psychological specimens and types. Bradford explicitly named the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve and his biographical method as a model. In his “psychographic” sketches, over 100 in total, Bradford scrutinized personalities from various eras over the years, from Xenophon and Ovid to Casanova , Voltaire and Katharine the Great to Emily Dickinson and PT Barnum . Only in the late work The Quick and the Dead did he attempt to make sketches of living people (including Theodore Roosevelt , Lenin and Mussolini ). After his biography on Lee, he gave up the essay-like short form only twice for book-length psychographic studies, namely for Charles Darwin and DL Moody ; In 1928 he also published an "autobiography of humanity" on the soul.

Even if they have been completely forgotten today, Bradford's biographical works enjoyed great popularity among readers during his lifetime. His dignified style and his innocuous subject - character and nobility of "great" men and women of world history - made him a popular author, especially in middle-class circles, but Henry L. Mencken was also one of his admirers. Bradford maintained intensive correspondence with numerous intellectuals, such as Robert Frost . Shortly after Bradford's death in 1932, Van Wyck Brooks first published a selection from Bradford's extensive diary, then a selection of his letters.

In 1915 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Works (selection)

Biographies and essays

  • Types of American Character . Macmillan, London and New York 1895.
  • Lee the American . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1912.
  • Confederate portraits . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1912.
  • Union portraits . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1916.
  • Portraits of Women . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1916.
  • Portraits of American Women . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1917.
  • A Naturalist of Souls: Studies in Psychography . Dodd, Mead, New York 1917.
  • American Portraits, 1875-1900 . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1922.
  • Damaged Souls . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1923.
  • Bare Souls . Harper, London and New York 1924.
  • The Soul of Samuel Pepys . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1924.
  • Wives . Harper, London and New York 1925.
  • Darwin . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1926.
  • DL Moody, A Worker in Souls . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1927.
  • Life and I, an Autobiography of Humanity . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1928.
  • Daughters of Eve . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1928.
  • As God Made Them: Portraits of Some Nineteenth Century Americans. Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1929.
  • The Quick and the Dead . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1929.
  • Saints and Sinners . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1932.
  • Biography and the Human Heart . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1932.
  • Elizabethan Women . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1936.

Poetry

Novels

Letters and diaries

  • Van Wyck Brooks (ed.): The Journal of Gamaliel Bradford, 1883-1932. Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1933.
  • Van Wyck Brooks (ed.): The Letters of Gamaliel Bradford, 1918-1931 . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1934.

Secondary literature

  • CK Bolton: Gamaliel Bradford: A Memoir . In: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 65, 1940. pp. 81-91.
  • Marion Edmonds: Gamaliel Bradford . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography , Volume 17. Gale Research Co., Detroit 1983. pp. 92-97.
  • Richard A. Hutch: Explorations in Character: Gamaliel Bradford and Henry Murray as Psychobiographers . In: Biography 4: 4, 1981. pp. 312-325.
  • Edward Wagenknecht: Gamaliel Bradford . Twayne, Boston 1982. (= Twayne's United States Authors Series [TUSAS] 422)
  • Dale Warren: Gamaliel Bradford: A Personal Sketch . In: South Atlantic Quarterly 32, 1933. pp. 9-18.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Gamaliel Bradford. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 17, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Bradford, Gamaliel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bradford VI., Gamaliel; Bradford, Gamaliel Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston
DATE OF DEATH April 11, 1932
Place of death Wellesley , Massachusetts