Joel Barlow - Biography

Biography

Barlow was born in Redding, Fairfield County, Connecticut. He briefly attended Dartmouth College before graduating from Yale University in 1778, where he was also a postgraduate student for two years. In 1778, he published an anti-slavery poem entitled "The Prospect of Peace". From September 1780 until the close of the revolutionary war was chaplain in a Massachusetts brigade. Then, in 1783, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in July 1784 established a weekly paper called American Mercury, with which he was connected for a year. In 1786 he was admitted to the bar.

At Hartford he was a member of a group of young writers including Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, and John Trumbull, known in American literary history as the "Hartford Wits". He contributed to the Anarchiad, a series of satirico-political papers, and in 1787 published a long and ambitious poem, The Vision of Columbus, which gave him a considerable literary reputation and was once much read. Barlow died of pneumonia in the village of Zarnowiec, between Warsaw and Kraków, on December 24, 1812.