Howard Hoppin

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1856, Howard Hoppin is chiefly remembered as an American architect. Contemporary reference sources and library records connect him with both architecture and a small body of literary work, showing a creative life that reached beyond one field.

For readers, the clearest surviving title is The Cinnamon Heart: A Mediæval Candy Scrape in 3 Acts, a comic play he wrote with Arthur L. Brown. Project Gutenberg and library listings preserve the work, which was entered in 1881 and presents Hoppin as a writer with a taste for whimsy, theatrical fun, and cheerful absurdity.

He died in 1940. While his reputation today rests more on the buildings he designed than on a long literary career, that playful published work offers a charming glimpse of a cultured nineteenth-century figure whose imagination moved easily between structure and storytelling.