author
Samuel Low
b. 1765
An early American poet and playwright from New York, he wrote with a lively mix of satire, patriotism, and literary ambition. His best-known surviving work, The Politician Out-witted, offers a small but vivid glimpse of post-Revolutionary American theater.
1 Audiobook
The Politician Out-Witted
by Samuel Low
About the author
Born in New York City in 1765, Samuel Low was an American poet and dramatist active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bibliographic and reference sources identify him with New York literary circles, and note that he published poetry as well as the comedy The Politician Out-witted, written in 1788 and published in 1789.
Low also published Poems in two volumes in 1800. Surviving records suggest he came from a mercantile family in New York, and one scholarly author entry notes that he was a Mason who wrote occasional poems for his lodge. Although he is not widely read today, his work remains part of the record of the young United States' early literary culture.
Very little about his later life is easy to confirm from widely available sources, so most modern notices focus on the books themselves rather than a full personal biography. That scarcity gives his writing an added appeal: it preserves the voice of an author from the nation's first generation of homegrown playwrights and poets.