author
Day Kellogg Lee
1816–1869
A 19th-century Universalist minister who also turned working life into fiction, writing stories about farms, factories, and trades with an eye for everyday American experience. His best-known books bring together moral purpose, social observation, and the rhythms of ordinary labor.
1 Audiobook
Summerfield or, Life on a Farm
by Day Kellogg Lee
About the author
Born in Sempronius, Cayuga County, New York, on September 10, 1816, Day Kellogg Lee entered the ministry in 1835 and became a Universalist pastor. Sources from his era describe him serving several churches before later leading the Third Universalist Church on Bleecker Street in New York City, where he died in 1869.
Lee is remembered today mainly for his fiction, especially Summerfield; or, Life on a Farm, Merrimack; or, Life at the Loom, and The Master Builder; or, Life at a Trade. Those titles suggest what made his work distinctive: he wrote about rural life and working people, turning familiar American settings into stories meant to entertain while also reflecting on character, labor, and social life.
Although he is not a widely known name now, his books have remained accessible through major library and public-domain collections, which has helped preserve his place as a small but interesting voice in 19th-century American religious and popular literature.