Horace Scudder

Horace Elisha Scudder

Horace Elisha Scudder (October 16, 1838 – January 11, 1902) was a prolific American man of letters and editor.^[1]

Biography

He was born into a Boston family; his brothers were David Coit Scudder and Samuel Hubbard Scudder. He graduated from Boston Latin School in 1854 and from Williams College in 1858, taught school in New York City, and subsequently, returned to Boston and devoted himself to literary work.

He is now best known for his children's books and the editorship he held of The Atlantic Monthly. He published the Bodley Books (1875–87) and was also an essayist, and produced large quantities of journalism that was printed anonymously. He was a correspondent of Hans Christian Andersen and biographer of James Russell Lowell. He edited also The Riverside Magazine.

Scudder also prepared, with Mrs Taylor, the Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor (1884) and was series editor for the extensive "American Commonwealths Series" for Houghton Mifflin.

Scudder may have been most famous for his 1884 work A History of the United States of America Preceded By a Narrative of the Discovery and Settlement of North America and of the Events Which Led to the Independence of the Thirteen English Colonies for the Use of Schools and Academies, which long set the standard for American history textbooks.

Works

• Seven Little People and Their Friends (1862)
• Life and Letters of David Coit Scudder (1864)
• Dream Children (1864)
• Stories from my Attic (1869)
• Stories and Romances (1880)
• Noah Webster ("American Men of Letters," 1882)
• A History of the United State of America Preceded By a Narrative of the Discovery and Settlement of North America and of the Events Which Led to the Independence of the Thirteen English Colonies for the Use of Schools and Academies (1884 and later editions)
• History of the United States (1884)
• Men and Letters (1887), essays
• George Washington (1889)
• Childhood in Literature and Art (1894)
• Life of James Russell Lowell (1901)
• The Book of Fables and Folk Stories

References

1. "Scudder, Horace Elisha". Appletons' Cyclopaedia for 1902. NY: D. Appleton & Company. 1903. pp. 475–476.

• The Andersen-Scudder Letters (University of California Press, 1949)
• Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Horace Elisha Scudder,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 37, No. 23 (Aug., 1902), pp. 657–661.
• New York Times obituary

External links

• Works by Horace Scudder at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Horace Scudder at Internet Archive
• Works by Horace Scudder at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Horace Elisha Scudder(1838 - 1902) The Baldwin Project
• The Jean Hersholt Collection at the Library of Congress contains Hans Christian Andersen's correspondence (1868–74) with his American publisher Horace E. Scudder.