author
Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Grund
1804–1863
A sharp-eyed immigrant journalist and author, he wrote vividly about American society, politics, and class in the early republic. His best-known books helped shape how 19th-century readers saw the United States from both inside and outside its culture.
3 Audiobooks
Aristocracy in America. From the sketch-book of a German nobleman. vol. 1 (of 2)
by Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Grund
Aristocracy in America. From the sketch-book of a German nobleman. vol. 2 (of 2)
by Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Grund
About the author
Born in Bohemia in 1805, Francis Joseph Grund became an American journalist, author, and political commentator after immigrating to the United States in 1827. He is best known for The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (1837), a widely noted study of the young republic, and for Aristocracy in America (1839), which explored class and democracy in the United States.
Grund also worked as a teacher and writer on scientific subjects before turning more fully to journalism and public affairs. Over time he became active in partisan newspaper culture, and during the Civil War he served as editor of the Philadelphia Age. Contemporary biographical sources note that he died in Philadelphia in 1863.
Catalog and library records sometimes list his birth year as 1804, while other biographical sources give 1805. What is clear is that his work captured an outsider’s energetic, often critical view of American life at a moment when the nation was still defining itself.