Biography
Campbell was born on September 28, 1867, in Pomeroy, Ohio; he later died there in 1896.
According to James Weldon Johnson, there is little known about Campbell's early life, which he kept shielded even from his closest associates. He attended public schools in Pomeroy and spent time at Miami College and wrote regularly for daily newspapers in Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s. Campbell participated in a group publication, the Four O'Clock Magazine, a literary magazine that was quite popular for a time.
Campbell served as the first president of West Virginia Colored Institute (now West Virginia State University) from 1892–1894.
He is best known for his work Echoes from the Cabin and Elsewhere, a volume of poetry. Many of his poems are written in the dialect of his subjects or the vernacular of the time, as well as standard English.
Picture is available at
Read more about this topic: James Edwin Campbell (poet)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“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.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“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)