Thomas Dunn English

author

Thomas Dunn English

1819–1902

A restless 19th-century man of letters, he moved through medicine, law, journalism, poetry, and politics with unusual ease. He is best remembered for writing the once-beloved ballad “Ben Bolt,” and for a long-running literary quarrel with Edgar Allan Poe.

1 Audiobook

The boy's book of battle-lyrics : a collection of verses illustrating some notable events in the history of the United States of America, from the colonial period to the outbreak of the sectional war

The boy's book of battle-lyrics : a collection of verses illustrating some notable events in the history of the United States of America, from the colonial period to the outbreak of the sectional war

by Thomas Dunn English

About the author

Born near Philadelphia in 1819, Thomas Dunn English built one of those wide-ranging careers that now feels almost impossible. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was admitted to the bar, and worked as a journalist and editor while steadily publishing poems, stories, plays, and novels.

His most famous work was the 1843 ballad “Ben Bolt,” which became enormously popular as a song. English also spent time in what is now West Virginia, wrote across several genres, and later entered public life, serving as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New Jersey from 1891 to 1895.

He remains a vivid literary footnote partly because of his bitter feud with Edgar Allan Poe, but his own career was substantial in its own right: physician, lawyer, newspaper writer, poet, novelist, and congressman, all in one life. He died in 1902 in Newark, New Jersey.