Moses Coit Tyler

Born in Griswold, Connecticut, in 1835, Moses Coit Tyler became an influential American writer, teacher, and historian. He studied at Yale, entered the ministry early in life, and later turned toward literature and scholarship, building a career that connected history, criticism, and education.

Tyler is especially remembered for helping establish American literary history as an academic subject. He taught at the University of Michigan and later held a chair of American history at Cornell University, where his work reached a wide audience. His books on colonial literature and the literary history of the American Revolution were valued for treating American writing as an important field of study in its own right.

Clear, energetic, and deeply interested in the intellectual life of the early United States, Tyler wrote in a way that made scholarly subjects feel alive. He died in 1900, but his work remains part of the foundation of American literary and historical scholarship.