William Cullen Bryant 1794 – 1878

William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant, an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. was born on November 3, 1794, in a log cabin near Cummington, Massachusetts; the home of his birth is today marked with a plaque. He was the second son of Peter Bryant (b. Aug. 12, 1767, d. Mar. 20, 1820), a doctor and later a state legislator, and Sarah Snell (b. Dec. 4, 1768, d. May 6, 1847). Bryant and his family moved to a new home when he was two years old. The William Cullen Bryant Homestead, his boyhood home, is now a museum. After just two years at Williams College, he studied law in Worthington and Bridgewater in Massachusetts, and he was admitted to the bar in 1815. He then began practicing law in nearby Plainfield, walking the seven miles from Cummington every day. On one of these walks, in December 1815, he noticed a single bird flying on the horizon; the sight moved him enough to write “To a Waterfowl”.

• William Cullen Bryant Published 1888 by J.B. Lippicott  Library of Congress   Digital Collection
• Inventory of the Bryant Family Archive Collection, Princeton, Illinois
• William Cullen Bryant: To a Musquito
• William Cullen Bryant Homestead
• Tribute to William Cullen Bryant. By Robert C. Waterston, at the meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, June 13, 1878.
• Poetical works of William Cullen Bryant
• Poetical works of William Cullen Bryant 1879
• The early poems of William Cullen Bryant with a biographical sketch by Nathan Haskell Dole
• The story of William Cullen Bryant for young readers by Sherwin Cody
• Drawings of the William Cullen Bryant Homestead