Stephen H. Branch

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 11, 1813, Stephen H. Branch was an American writer, editor, and self-promoting newspaper man. His own memoir, The Life of Stephen H. Branch (1857), fixes his birth year and place, and surviving library records show him as the author of that work.

Branch is best remembered for editing Stephen H. Branch's Alligator, a New York political paper published in 1858. Library of Congress, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg records all preserve the paper and identify him as its editor, showing that he was active in the rough-and-tumble print culture of mid-19th-century New York.

Later accounts describe him as a tireless, eccentric presence around newspaper offices, always writing, arguing, and pushing his latest piece into print. Some colorful details about his life come from Branch's own writing or from much later retellings, so the safest picture is of a restless, highly visible journalist whose surviving works still capture his dramatic, combative style.