VERY RARE "American Biographer" James Parton Hand Written Note For Sale

Up for sale a VERY RARE! "American Biographer" James Parton Hand Written Note.

ES-9949

James Parton (February 9, 1822 – October 17,

1891) was an English-born American biographer who wrote books on the lives of Horace

Greeley, Aaron Burr, Andrew

Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas

Jefferson, Voltaire, and the "Eminent Women of the Age" Parton was born in Canterbury,

England, in 1822. He was taken to the United States when he was five years old,

studied in New York City and White Plains, New York, and was a

schoolmaster in Philadelphia and then in New York. He moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he died

on October 17, 1891. Parton was the most popular biographer of his day in

America. Parton's nonfiction combined elements of novel writing, which made his

books quite popular. Harriet Beecher Stowe once thanked him

"for the pleasure you have given me in biographical works which you have

had the faculty of making more interesting than romance (let me trust it is not

by making them in part works of imagination)." His first wife, Sara (1811–1872),

sister of Nathaniel Parker Willis, and widow of Charles H. Eldredge (d.

1846), attained considerable popularity as a writer under the pen-name Fanny Fern.

They were married in 1856. Her works include the novels, Ruth Hall

(1854), reminiscent of her own life, and Rose Clark (1857); and several

volumes of sketches and stories. In 1876 Parton married Ellen Willis Eldredge, his

first wife's daughter by her first husband, Charles Eldredge. With Ellen (and

previously Fanny Fern), he raised Ethel, the daughter of Grace Eldrege (Fanny

Fern's daughter) and writer Mortimer

Thomson (also known as Philander Doesticks). Although never legally

adopted by Parton, she took his last name upon reaching her majority. Ethel Parton became a

famous writer of children's books about 19th-century life in Newburyport, MA,

published in the 1930s and 1940s.