Holmes Oliver Wendell

Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809-1894), American man of letters, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and received his education at Harvard University. After leaving college he studied medicine, and in 1836 took his degree of doctor in that faculty at Harvard. After holding a professorship of anatomy and physiology at Darthlouth College for two years (1839-41), he settled at Boston, where he afterwards resided. From 1847 to 1882 he was professor of anatomy in the medical college at Harvard. Dr. Holmes published several works on medical subjects, but on this side of the Atlantic he is known chiefly in a literary capacity, and especially as the humorous author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860), and The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872). This entertaining series of "table talk" was published in the Atlantic Monthly, with which he became connected when it was started in 1857, and in which all his purely literary works written since that date have appeared. Before he made his mark in the Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Holmes had already gained some reputation as a poet. His early poems, a collection of which appeared at Boston in 1836, were chiefly occasional pieces of a humorous cheeracter. Since then his Sonys in Many Keys (1862), Songs of Many Seasons (1875), and The Iron Gate and Other Poems (1880) have shown that he is a graceful writer of lyrics. His other works include Elsie Venncr, a Bomance of Destiny (1861), Memoirs of J. L. Motley (1878) and R. W. Emerson (1884), A Mortal Antipathy (1885), and Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887). Over the Teaewps, pul> lisbed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1890, is in the same vein as the Breakfast Table papers.