Samuel L. (Samuel Lorenzo) Knapp

Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1783, he graduated from Dartmouth College in 1804 and studied law with Theophilus Parsons. He built a legal career, served in the Massachusetts legislature from 1812 to 1816, and during the War of 1812 commanded a militia regiment on coastal defense duty.

After financial trouble and imprisonment for debt, he moved to Boston and turned much of his energy toward writing and editing. He edited the Boston Gazette, published the Boston Monthly Magazine, and became known for a remarkably wide range of work: biography, literary criticism, fiction, essays, and public commentary.

Knapp is often remembered as one of the early republic's most industrious literary figures. Later writers have described him as an important early American biographer and, in Dartmouth's own retrospective, as the college's first professional man of letters. No suitable verified portrait image was found from the available Wikipedia page images, so none is included here.