CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
HUMORIST AND JOURNALIST.
HARLES DUDLEY WARNER belongs to a class of writers which has been aptly called the meditative school in American literature, but few of the so-called meditative writers so sparkle with humor as does the genial and humane author of “My Summer in a Garden,” and few writers of any school have so succeeded in presenting wholesome truth and lofty thought in the pleasing form of humorous conversation on such common subjects as gardening, back-log fires, and the every-day life of the farmer-boy.
He is one of our leading apostles of culture, and he is himself a glowing example of the worth of culture, for he has steadily raised himself from the flat levels of life to a lofty pinnacle of influence and power simply because he possessed in high degree a keen insight, a dainty lightness of touch, a delicacy of thought and style, a kindly humor, and a racy scent for “human nature.” It was a long time before he discovered his own powers and he labored at a distasteful profession until his nature cried out for its true sphere, but his early life in many respects was imperceptibly ministering to the man that was to be.
He was born of English non-conformist stock, in the hill country of Plainfield, Massachusetts, in 1829—a lineal descendent of a “Pilgrim Father” and the son of a well-to-do farmer, of more than ordinary mental parts. He had his period in the New England district school, and in 1851 he was graduated from Hamilton College, New York, where he had gained a college reputation as a writer.
Had he not been a “born writer” the next period of his life would have made a literary career impossible for him. A winter in Michigan, ending in dismal failure, two years of frontier life as a surveyor, and then the pursuit of legal studies, followed by the practice of law in Chicago seemed to have been hostages to fortune against the pursuit of fame in the field of pure literature.
But he had the blood of the “Brahman caste” and it was certain to assert itself. In 1860, his friend Hawley (now United States Senator from Connecticut) invited him to accept the position of assistant editor on the Hartford “Press,” and his talents for successful journalism were at once apparent, from which he stepped quite naturally into the narrower circle—“the brotherhood of authors.”