John Neal

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Neal, John (1793–1876), was born in Portland, Me., of a Quaker family. He began his feverish literary career during his twenties, when he was studying law in Baltimore, by editing The Portico and doing some hackwork on Paul Allen's history of the Revolution. His own writing during this period included two narrative poems, Battle of Niagara and Goldau, or, the Maniac Harper, published in 1818 under the pseudonym Jehu O'Cataract, and a blank‐verse romantic tragedy, Otho (1819). His early novels include Keep Cool (1817), partly a tract against dueling; Logan, A Family History (2 vols., 1822), a romantic account of the Indian chief; Errata; or, The Works of Will. Adams (2 vols., 1823); Seventy‐Six (2 vols., 1823), a Revolutionary Romance, considered his best work; and Randolph (1823), a romantic epistolary novel. The last, in addition to containing much criticism of English and American authors, had a lengthy attack on the Baltimore statesman William Pinkney, whose son Edward challenged the author. Neal, who was much opposed to dueling, ignored the challenge. In the same year, he sailed for England, where Blackwood's Magazine, notoriously hostile to American writers, accepted some two dozen of his articles. The most notable of these form a series of five papers (Sept. 1824–Feb. 1825) on 135 American authors. Written without access to the books, the papers abound in errors of fact as well as of prejudice, but are significant as the first attempt at a history of American literature, and as such have been reprinted under Neal's title American Writers (1937). While abroad, he wrote and published Brother Jonathan (3 vols., 1825), a long romantic novel concerned with New England prior to the Revolution. In 1827 he returned to Portland, where he continued to contribute to periodicals, edited a literary journal, practiced law, and wrote four further novels, Rachel Dyer (1828), a study of the Salem witchcraft trials; Authorship (1830), a picaresque tale of a New Englander abroad; The Down‐Easters (1833), a melodramatic story with realistic details about New England; and True Womanhood (1859). He also published One Word More (1854), a religious treatise; dime novels of Indian adventures; Great Mysteries and Little Plagues (1870), anecdotes and sayings of children; and Portland Illustrated (1874), describing the city. Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life (1869) is a garrulous autobiography that, although not completely trustworthy, gives a fine understanding of the general character of this enthusiastic, flamboyant writer.

O'Cataract, Jehu, see Neal, John.