Biography
Simpson was born in 1872 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He graduated from Jersey City High School and attended Columbia Law School but could not afford to complete his studies there. He worked for a judge and took a second job as a reporter, working for the New York Recorder and then for the New York World and New York Globe.
Simpson started his political career as an election officer in Jersey City's First Ward. He was a member of the New Jersey General Assembly for three terms and the New Jersey Senate from 1920 to 1930. In 1932 he was the Democratic candidate for United States Senate, unsuccessfully opposing Republican nominee Dwight Morrow.
In his position as Assistant Attorney General, Simpson achieved fame as the prosecuting attorney in the Hall-Mills Murder trial. After investigating the 1922 murder of Edward Wheeler Hall, a New Brunswick Episcopal priest, and Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a member of Hall's choir, Simpson was assigned as a special prosecutor in 1926 in the state's case against the priest's wife and her brothers. The three defendants were never convicted and the case remained unsolved.
Simpson died in 1953 at Jersey City Medical Center at the age of 81.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Simpson
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)