Samuel Low

Born in New York City on December 12, 1765, Samuel Low was an American poet and playwright whose life now survives mostly through a small body of published work and later reference sources. Accounts describe him as coming from a mercantile family and supporting himself in practical jobs while pursuing literature.

Low is best remembered for The Politician Out-Witted (1789), a comedy written in the early national period, and for Poems. In Two Volumes (1800). His writing is often linked to the political and civic energy of the early United States, with poems and dramatic work that reflect debates around independence, the Constitution, and public life in the new nation.

He does not seem to have been a prolific author, and even basic details of his later life are hard to confirm with confidence. That relative obscurity is part of what makes his work interesting today: it preserves the voice of a writer responding directly to the hopes, tensions, and self-definition of the early American republic.