William Cullen Bryant (Dictionary of World Biography: The 19th Century)
Early Life
William Cullen Bryant was born November 3, 1794, in Cummington, Massachusetts. His father, Dr. Peter Bryant, was a physician who left Cummington to escape his debts soon after Bryant was born. When he returned two years later, the precocious child had already begun to read the Bible under the tutelage of his mother, née Sarah Snell, and her father, who was a noted deacon in the Congregationalist church. The child was reared in an atmosphere of Calvinist piety and sober devotion to literature.
Bryant wrote his first notable poem when he was ten years old, a...
[The entire page is 2469 words long]
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