George Parsons Lathrop - Life

Life

George Parsons Lathrop was born August 25, 1851 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father was physician George Alfred Lathrop, mother was Frances Maria (Smith) Lathrop, and brother Francis Lathrop. He was educated at New York and Dresden, Germany, when he returned to New York, and decided on a literary career. Going to England on a visit he was married in London, September 11, 1871, to Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1875 he became associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and remained in that position two years, leaving it for newspaper work in Boston and New York. His contributions to the periodical and daily Press were varied and voluminous. In 1883 he founded the American Copyright League, which finally secured the international copyright law.

Lathrop was also one of the founders of the Catholic Summer School of America. He and his wife were received into the Roman Catholic Church in New York in March 1891. Among his published works are: Rose and Roof-tree (1875), poems; A Study of Hawthorne (1876); Afterglow (1876), a novel; Spanish Vistas (1883), a work on travel; Newport (1884), a novel; Dreams and Days (1892), poems; A Story of Courage (1894), centenary history of the Visitation Convent, Georgetown, D.C. He edited (1883) a complete, and the standard, edition of Hawthorne's works, and adapted The Scarlet Letter for Walter Damrosch's opera of that title, which was produced at New York in 1896.

Lathrop died on April 19, 1898 in New York. After his death his widow, as Mother M. Alphonsa, organized a community of Dominican tertiaries, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who took charge of two cancer hospitals at New York.