William Douglas O'Connor

Born in Boston on January 2, 1832, William Douglas O'Connor was an American author, editor, and essayist whose career moved through magazines, newspapers, and government service. In the 1850s he published poetry and stories in major periodicals, worked at The Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia, and married Ellen M. Tarr, with whom he had two children.

O'Connor wrote the antislavery novel Harrington: A Story of True Love in 1860, showing how strongly politics and conscience shaped his writing. During and after the Civil War he lived in Washington, D.C., where he became one of Walt Whitman's closest friends and supporters.

His best-known work is The Good Gray Poet (1866), a passionate pamphlet written to defend Whitman after the poet lost a government job. That fierce loyalty helped shape Whitman's public image, and it remains the reason O'Connor is most often remembered today. He died in Washington, D.C., on May 9, 1889.