author
Mary Lowell Putnam
1810–1898
Remembered as a gifted linguist and writer from Boston’s remarkable Lowell family, she brought European literature and politics to American readers and later turned her pen toward antislavery writing. Her career moved from translation and literary essays to forceful work shaped by reform, travel, and personal loss.
1 Audiobook
Fifteen Days: An Extract from Edward Colvil's Journal
by Mary Lowell Putnam
About the author
Born in Boston on December 3, 1810, Mary Traill Spence Lowell Putnam was the daughter of the minister Charles Lowell and the sister of James Russell Lowell and Robert Traill Spence Lowell. She married merchant Samuel R. Putnam in 1832 and became known as an author with an unusual gift for languages, reportedly working in French, Italian, German, Polish, Swedish, and Hungarian as well as other languages.
Her early literary career included magazine writing and translation, including a Swedish work by Fredrika Bremer. She wrote on Polish and Hungarian literature and history, and in 1850 she anonymously published History of the Constitution of Hungary in Its Relations to Austria. Sources also describe her as living in France and Germany during the 1850s, where she deepened her language study.
After returning to the United States, she became a prominent abolitionist writer. Her books included Record of an Obscure Man, the slavery dramas The Tragedy of Errors and The Tragedy of Success, Fifteen Days, and memoirs of her son William Lowell Putnam and her father. She died in Boston on June 1, 1898.