Biography
Hale was born on April 3, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Nathan Hale (1784–1863), proprietor and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, and the brother of Lucretia Peabody Hale, Susan Hale, and Charles Hale. Edward Hale was the nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, while his father was the nephew of Nathan Hale, the war hero who was executed by the British for espionage during the Revolutionary War. He was also a descendant of Richard Everett and related to Helen Keller.
At the age of thirteen Edward Hale enrolled in Harvard, as the youngest in the class of 1839. While there he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin prizes, and was considered the Class Poet. He graduated second in his class.
Hale was licensed to preach by the Boston Association of Ministers and in 1846 was settled in the Church of the Unity in Worcester. He was pastor of the Church of the Unity, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1846-1856, and of the South Congregational (Unitarian) Church, Boston, in 1856-1899. In 1903 he became Chaplain of the United States Senate. He maintained a home in South Kingstown, Rhode Island where he and his family often spent summer months.
Hale married Emily Baldwin Perkins in 1852; she was the niece of Connecticut Governor and U.S. Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins Baldwin on her father's side and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher on her mother's side. They had nine children: one daughter and eight sons. Hale died in Roxbury, by then part of Boston, in 1909.
Read more about this topic: Edward Everett Hale
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)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)