author
H. P. (Henry Perry) Leland
1828–1868
Best remembered for a lively 1863 portrait of expatriate life in Italy and a Civil War–era satire co-written with Charles Godfrey Leland, this nineteenth-century American writer also worked as a painter. His small body of published work hints at a career cut short far too early.
1 Audiobook
Ye book of Copperheads
by Charles Godfrey Leland, H. P. (Henry Perry) Leland
About the author
Henry Perry Leland was an American writer and painter who lived from 1828 to 1868. Reliable catalog and reference sources connect him with Americans in Rome (1863), a book about American life and society in Rome, and with Ye Book of Copperheads (1863), a Civil War–era satire written with Charles Godfrey Leland.
Although he is not widely known today, Leland appears in literary reference records from the Walt Whitman Archive, and bibliographic listings such as the Library of Congress and the Online Books Page preserve the outline of his work. Those sources suggest a creative life that moved between visual art and writing, with Rome and the politics of the 1860s as key subjects.
Very little biographical detail is easy to confirm beyond his dates and publications, so the surviving picture is necessarily brief. Even so, his work offers a glimpse of an American author-artist whose voice belonged to a vivid and unsettled moment in nineteenth-century culture.