Biography
Babgy was born in Buckingham County, Virginia to George Bagby and Virginia Evans. He attended Delaware College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied medicine. Afterwards, he became engaged in editorial work, especially on the Southern Literary Messenger, from 1859 to near the close of the American Civil War. Subsequently, he was made State librarian and became widely known as a lecturer and humorist, writing under the name "Mozis Addums." He having kept alive the old school of Southern humor, founded by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Johnson J. Hooper. An example of this humor, which contained local dialect, phonetic spelling and an eccentric character, is Rubenstein’s Piano-Playin. It is a short narrative of a surly, less-than-sophisticated soul, who describes how he was deeply moved by a piano concert. His works were collected in three volumes (Richmond, 1884-86).
Bagby is less known for his work as a journalist. As the Richmond correspondent of the Charleston Mercury during the Civil War, Bagby covered the politics of the war and made a reputation for Hermes, his pen name, as a fearless writer who would criticize Confederate General Robert E. Lee as easily as Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Bagby's most popular essay was "The Old Virginia Gentleman" (1877), a paean to antebellum plantation life in Virginia.
Read more about this topic: George William Bagby
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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