Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most beloved authors in American history. He has long been something of a people's poet that anyone can digest. He had an easy metre that rolled smoothly and great powers of description. Some of the most famous cliches in the English Language such as "Forest Primeval", "Shot Heard Round the World", etc, came from him. He celebrated a spectrum of people and places, but was notable in being one of the first to bring the New World into being as a subject for epic narrative.

He was also known for being just plain nice. This is one of the things most notable about him. Liking or not liking his writing is taste (though his writing has stood the test of generational consensus) but it is hard to imagine anyone disliking him. He was known to be friendly with all sorts of people and not just those in his Ivy-league circles.

He was born to Stephen and Zilpa Longfellow, the son of a congressman and lawyer of respectable New England lineage. He attended a Dame School (an elementary school taught by a Schoolmarm) as a child and entered Bowdain college at fifteen. Bowdain was known for such distinguished students and alumni as Nathaniel Hawthorn, Hariet Beecher Stowe, and Joshua Chamberlain. He was accepted into Harvard on condition that he take a Grand Tour of Europe. This was a normal Rite of Passage of rich young men at the time and the more literary inclined of them often left fascinating travelogues. Before he did this he married a friend from childhood, Mary Storer. This was to prove a blighted marriage, not so much because it wasn't happy (Longfellow just had a knack for being happy), but because it was cut off when she died in childbirth after four years.

He latter married Fanny Appleton and had six children by her. He had the misfortune to outlive her too when she died in a fire. In the meantime, his academic career prospered and he became a Harvard Professor. He also began his writing career and published several books, mostly poetry collections, which are still widely read today.


 * Voices of the Night
 * Juvenile and Earlier Poems
 * Ballads and Other Poems
 * Poems on Slavery
 * The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems
 * Birds of Passage
 * Songs and Sonnets
 * The Spanish Student
 * Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
 * The Seaside and the Fireside
 * The Song of Hiawatha
 * The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems
 * Tales of a Wayside Inn
 * Flower-de-Luce
 * Dante's Divine Comedy
 * The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems
 * Keramos and Other Poems
 * Ultima Thule
 * In the Harbor
 * Judas Maccabeus
 * Michalangelo: A Fragment
 * Fragment
 * Translations
 * Hyperion: A Romance
 * Kavanaugh
 * Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea


 * Badass Israeli: Judah Maccabee in the play "Judas Maccabeus".
 * the victory celebration of the Jews in that play counts as An Asskicking Christmas of course. It's the first Hanukah (or at least the first with those associations as it was co-opted from a ceremony mentioned in Torah).
 * Defictionalisation: The original Sudberry Inn (the inspiration for Tales of a Wayside Inn) was refitted into a theme B&B and is still in operation.
 * Friend to All Children: He always loved children and took time to answer letters from them.
 * Genius Book Club: Well isn't that obvious? He's Longfellow. He wrote lots of books and collected them as well. He also had a number of still-famed academics as friends.
 * Gentleman and a Scholar: Longfellow himself obviously as well as several of his friends and several of his characters.
 * Gentle Giant: The Village Blacksmith of the poem by that name is a gigantic man as befits his trade and likes nothing more bellicose than seeing children watch sparks fly when he makes horseshoes or sitting with his sons in Church and watching his daughter sing.
 * Germans Love David Hasselhoff: He often dealt with foreign subjects as well as American and had a wide diversity. Italy was a favorite setting of his.
 * Girl Next Door: Mary, at least in the more-or-less literal sense as he apparently always knew her. Probably in the tropish sense too, at least she does not seem to be recorded as doing anything outside the standards of respectability.
 * Good Parents
 * Grey and Gray Morality: A version of the Saga of King Olaf is chanted by a Norwegian poet in Tales of a Wayside Inn. In it there is not much to choose between the bloodthirsty Christian vikings and the bloodthirsty Pagan vikings except both are well, bloodthirsty,both have redeeming qualities and both are of course members of a Proud Warrior Race.
 * Happily Married: Twice.
 * Hollywood New England: Longfellow often romanticizes New England. Actually he romanticizes a lot of places. But he was one of the first writers to do this and he had a special position to do so as he was privileged to see its positive sides. He usually treats New England positively in his poems. Miles Standish (a famous historical leader), in The Courtship of Miles Standish though appears as a rather brutal warrior, which is natural as that was what he was historically.
 * I Will Find You: Evangeline is about a French-Canadian couple separated in an ethnic cleansing that would not be remembered except for Longfellow.
 * Nerds Are Sexy: Not ostentatiously so, but he did manage to have two women fall in love with him and had six children by the second.
 * Nested Stories: In Tales of a Wayside Inn several Intellectual Companions gather to tell stories they have read or heard from somewhere. One was aristocrat who was apparently descended from a Second Son across the pond and was a Justice of the Peace as well as the owner of the establishment. One was a Jewish Spice trader. One was a Norwegian who managed to lug a Stradivarius all the way up the road to play for his companions, one was a Unitarian Theologian, one was a Student, one was a Sicilian political fugitive and there may have been one or two that This Troper forgot. Every one was a Gentleman and a Scholar.
 * Noble Savage: Hiawatha. Do remember that this is an epic about American Indians (to the same metre as The Kalevala which is not inappropriate for the Great Lakes even as it goes well for Finland). The poem is not however an ethnographic study.
 * Scenery Porn: His descriptions are some of the most memorable things about his writing.
 * Second Love: Fanny
 * Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: The inspiration for Poems on Slavery. He was definitely a stout abolitionist.
 * Teen Genius: He was already writing poems that were widely regarded when he was in his teens, and while his gifts were a bit undeveloped they showed themselves.
 * Tear Jerker: While his life sometimes seems idyllic, he was not unaffected by tragedy. His favorite sister died of TB. One wife died in child birth and the other in an accident. His uncle died in the War of 1812 and his oldest son was wounded in the American Civil War.
 * The poem Christmas Bells was put to music and later sung by several including the The Man in Black himself. It is one of his better known poems of Eucatastrophe.
 * You All Meet in An Inn: The Wayside Inn of course.