author
James Mott Hallowell
b. 1865
A Boston-area writer and lawyer, he is best remembered for The Spirit of Lafayette, a 1918 book that linked Lafayette’s ideals to the democratic cause during World War I. His surviving record suggests a lively public career that reached beyond books into journalism, civic work, and public affairs.
1 Audiobook
The Spirit of Lafayette
by James Mott Hallowell
About the author
Born in 1865, James Mott Hallowell belonged to a New England family with deep reform-era roots. Available records describe him as a Harvard-educated man from West Medford who was active in athletics while also working as a college reporter for Boston newspapers.
His name appears in library and public-domain catalogs as the author of The Spirit of Lafayette (1918), a short historical work centered on the Marquis de Lafayette and the meaning of democracy in wartime. Other catalog records connect him with civic and legal writing, including reports and briefs from the early 1900s, which suggests a career shaped as much by public service and advocacy as by literary work.
Although he does not seem to have a large modern biographical footprint, the pieces that remain give a clear impression: Hallowell was a writer of public-minded interests, drawn to history, politics, and the ideals behind American civic life. His work on Lafayette captures that spirit especially well, presenting the past as something meant to inspire the present.