Edward Everett Hale

Edward Everett Hale (April 3, 1822 – June 10, 1909) was an American author and Unitarian clergyman.

He was was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Hale (1784-1863), proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, and grandnephew of Nathan Hale, the martyr spy. He graduated from Harvard in 1839; was pastor of the church of the Unity, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1846-1856, and of the South Congregational (Unitarian) church, Boston, in 1856-1899; and in 1903 became chaplain of the United States Senate. He died at Roxbury (Boston), Massachusetts, on the 10th of June 1909.

His forceful personality, organizing genius, and liberal practical theology, together with his deep interest in the anti-slavery movement (especially in Kansas), popular education (especially Chautauqua works), and the working-man's home, were active in raising the tone of American life for half a century. He was a constant and voluminous contributor to the newspapers and magavines. He was an assistant editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and edited the Christian Examiner, Old and New (which he assisted in founding in 1869; in 1875 it was merged in Scribner's Magazine), "Lend a Hand" (founded by him in 1886 and merged in the Charities Review in 1897), and the Lend a Hand Record; and he was the author or editor of more than sixty books--fiction, travel, sermons, biography and history.

He first came into notice as a writer in 1859, when he contributed the short story "My Double and How He Undid Me" to the Atlantic Monthly. He soon published in the same periodical other stories, the best known of which was "The Man Without a Country" (1863), which did much to strengthen the Union cause in the North, and in which, as in some of his other non-romantic tales, he employed a minute realism which has led his readers to suppose the narrative a record of fact. The two stories mentioned, and such others as "The Rag-Man and the Rag-Woman" and "The Skeleton in the Closet," gave him a prominent position among the short-story writers of America.

The story "Ten Times One is Ten" (1870), with its hero Harry Wadsworth, and its motto, first enunciated in 1869 in his Lowell Institute lectures, "Look up and not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand," led to the formation among young people of Lend-a-Hand Clubs, Look-up Legions and Harry Wadsworth Clubs. Out of the romantic Waldensian story In His Name (1873) there similarly grew several other oiganizations for religious work, such as King's Daughters, and King's Sons.

Writings

His famous short novel, The Man Without a Country, was published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863. It was intended to inspire patriotism during the American Civil War.

• Editor "Lend-a-Hand Record."
• The Man Without a Country (1863)
• Ten Times One is Ten
• Margaret Percival in America
• In His Name
• Mr. Tangier's Vacations
• Mrs. Merriam's Scholars
• His Level Best
• The Ingham Papers
• Ups and Downs
• Philip Nolan's Friends
• Fortunes of Rachel
• Four and Five
• Crusoe in New York
• Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
• Christmas in Narragansett
• Our Christmas in a Palace
• What Career?
• Boy's Heroes
• The Story of Massachusetts
• Sybaris and Other Homes
• For Fifty Years (poems)
• A New England Boyhood
• Chautauquan History of the United States
• If Jesus Came to Boston
• Memories of a Hundred Years
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• We, the People
• New England Ballads
• Prayers in the United States Senate
• The Brick Moon

Quote

I am one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

External link

• Works by Hale (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Edward_Everett_Hale) from Project Gutenberg