author
William Constantine Beecher
1849–1928
Best known for helping shape the major 1888 life of Henry Ward Beecher, this American writer came from one of the country’s most famous reform-minded families. His work preserves both the public story and the family memory behind a towering 19th-century figure.
1 Audiobook
A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
by William Constantine Beecher, Mrs. H. W. Beecher, Samuel Scoville
About the author
Born in Brooklyn in 1849, he was the son of the celebrated preacher Henry Ward Beecher and Eunice White Bullard Beecher. Sources on his exact birth year are not completely consistent, but library and archival records identify him as William Constantine Beecher and place his life in the years 1849–1928.
He is chiefly remembered as a co-author of A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (1888), written with Samuel Scoville and assisted by Mrs. H. W. Beecher. That book became his best-known published work and remains the title most closely linked with his name in major library catalogs and public-domain collections.
Some genealogical and archival sources also describe him as Yale-educated and later trained in law at Columbia, and Yale’s archival records confirm that he appears in the wider Beecher family papers. Even so, his lasting place in literary history comes from recording the life and legacy of his father from an unusually close, family-side point of view.