George William Curtis (February 24, 1824 – August 31, 1892) was an American writer, reformer, public speaker, and political activist. He was an abolitionist and supporter of civil rights for African Americans and Native Americans. He also advocated women's suffrage, civil service reform, and public education.

Early life and education

George William Curtis was born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 24, 1824. His father was also named George Curtis. His mother, Mary Elizabeth (Burrill) Curtis, was the daughter of former United States Senator James Burrill Jr. and died when the infant George was two years old.

At six, George was sent with his elder brother James Burrill Curtis to school in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where he remained for five years. In 1835, his father having remarried happily, the boys were brought home to Providence, where they stayed until around 1839, when they moved with their father to New York. Three years later, George and James fell in sympathy with the spirit of the transcendental movement and joined the Brook Farm communal experiment from 1842 to 1843. After leaving Brook Farm, George spent two years in New York and Concord, Massachusetts to be close to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Career

thumb|left|George William Curtis in an 1854 portrait by [[Samuel Laurence]]

From 1846 to 1850, Curtis travelled through Europe, Egypt and Syria. His travels formed the basis for his first work as an author. He returned in 1850 and settled on Staten Island and began work as a lecturer. He obtained a post on the New-York Tribune and started work on Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), a journal of his travels on the Nile. He became a favorite in New York City society. He wrote for Putnam's Magazine which he helped George Palmer Putnam to found. He became an associate editor along with Parke Godwin and managing editor Charles Frederick Briggs; the three also collaborated on a gift book called The Homes of American Authors (1853). In April of that year, he delivered at Baltimore his eleventh annual address as president of the National Civil Service Reform League, and in May he appeared for the last time in public, to repeat in New York an address on James Russell Lowell, which he had first delivered in Brooklyn on the 22nd of the preceding February, the anniversary of Lowell's birth.

thumb|180 px|Curtis circa 1890

Curtis was one of the original members of the Board of Education for what would become New York City and advocated educational reforms. He was a member of and frequent speaker at the Unitarian Church on Staten Island (the congregation still meets in the same building). A high school not far from his home is named for him. He is also immortalized with an annual namesake oratorical prize awarded by Columbia College of Columbia University.

Personal life and family

He married Anna Shaw Curtis at the Unitarian Church of the Redeemer in 1856. Curtis, another New England transplant to Staten Island, was a founding member of the Unitarian Church of Staten Island (originally the Unitarian Church of the Redeemer), an author, editor of Putnam's Magazine, and columnist for Harper's Weekly.

The Curtis and Shaw families counted Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau among their close associates.

The Underground Railroad was in use during the 1850s to help runaway slaves, and it is believed that the Curtises and the Shaws were very involved in the Railroad. The Shaw sisters, Anna and Josephine, and their mother, Sarah Sturgis, also spearheaded local efforts to help during the Civil War. George Curtis was targeted by Southern sympathizers, and Anna and her three children left Staten Island temporarily during the New York City draft riots in 1863 for the safety of her grandparents’ home in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Works

  • Notes of a Howadji (1851)
  • The Howadji in Syria (1852)
  • Lotus-Eating (1852)
  • Potiphar Papers (1853)
  • The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times (1856)
  • Prue and I (1856)
  • Trumps (1862)
  • Washington Irving: A Sketch (1891)
  • Essays from the Easy Chair (1892)
  • Other Essays from the Easy Chair (1893)
  • Orations And Addresses (1894)
  • Literary and Social Essays (1895)
  • Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis to John S. Dwight: Brook Farm and Concord (1898)
  • Ars Recte Vivendi (1898)

See also

  • Curtis High School on Staten Island is named for him. It was built in 1904.

Notes

Attribution:

References

  • George William Curtis, by Edward Cary, in the American Men of Letters series (Boston, 1894)
  • An Epistle to George William Curtis, by James Russell Lowell (1874–1887), in Lowell's Poems
  • George William Curtis, a Commemorative Address delivered before The Century Association, December 17, 1892, by Parke Godwin (New York, 1893)
  • Orations and Addresses by George William Curtis, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (5 vols. New York, 1894).
  • Galahad in the Gilded Age: A Life of George William Curtis, Linda Dowling. 528 pp. (United States: Xlibris, 2021)
  • George William Curtis Papers (MS Am 1124.5-1124.8) at Houghton Library, Harvard University.