Bird, Robert Montgomery

Bird, Robert Montgomery (1806–54), born in Delaware, studied at the University of Pennsylvania (M.D., 1827) and taught at the Pennsylvania Medical College (1841–43), but is famous as a novelist and dramatist. His early romantic tragedies and comedies of Philadelphia life such as The City Looking Glass (1828, published 1933) were followed by Pelopidas, an unproduced historical drama about the Theban revolt against Sparta, and The Gladiator (1831), his most popular play. In 1832 his friend Forrest produced Oralloossa, a tragedy concerned with the assassination of Pizarro, which he followed with Bird's best play, The Broker of Bogotá (1834). Bird revised Metamora (1836) for Forrest, but then, discouraged by the actor's failure to keep financial agreements, broke with him and turned to writing fiction. In 1834 he published anonymously Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest, a tale of the Mexican conquistadors, which was later praised by Prescott. The Infidel; or, The Fall of Mexico (1835) is a sequel. The Hawks of Hawk‐Hollow (1835), a romance of the Revolution, deals with a prominent Pennsylvania family's decline because of disloyalty to the patriot cause. Sheppard Lee (1836) uses a psychological study of metempsychosis to satirize contemporary social conditions, and reflects Bird's Whig sympathies in regard to slavery. His finest novel, Nick of the Woods; or, The Jibbenainosay (1837), was followed by Peter Pilgrim; or, A Rambler's Recollections (1838), a series of realistic travel sketches, and The Adventures of Robin Day (1839), a picaresque novel. Because of ill‐health, he wrote no more books, but in 1847, after some years of retirement, became literary editor and part owner of the Philadelphia North American, which he helped to edit until his death.