George William Curtis Biography Quotes 17 Report mistakes

Early Life
George William Curtis was born on February 24, 1824, in Providence, Rhode Island, and came of age in a mercantile New England family that soon moved to New York. His mother died when he was young, and the combination of loss and bookish temperament made him receptive to the moral and literary enthusiasms of his age. In adolescence he studied in settings shaped by liberal Protestant ideas, and he began to look beyond commerce toward letters and public service. He read widely, wrote early, and learned that a clear, musical prose style could be a calling.

Brook Farm and the Transcendentalist Circle
As a young man Curtis and his brother joined the experiment at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, guided by George Ripley. There he absorbed the reform spirit that animated New England in the 1840s and came into close contact with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the wider transcendentalist circle, including Margaret Fuller and, at a slight remove, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott. While Brook Farm was brief and finally impractical, it gave Curtis a lifelong faith that literature and conscience might help better the republic. He carried from those conversations an Emersonian emphasis on self-reliance tempered by a civic sense that would later define his essays and speeches.

Travels and Early Writings
Curtis traveled widely in Europe and the Near East, and the journeys furnished the graceful travel books that first made his name. Nile Notes of a Howadji and The Howadji in Syria translated his romantic curiosity into polished sketches of scenery, manners, and mood. Lotus-Eating gathered American wayfaring into a summer book of places and pleasures. Returning to New York, he turned his pen to the life around him. The Potiphar Papers satirized midcentury New York society and its pretensions, while Prue and I mixed humor and sentiment in portraits of modest domestic life. These volumes, issued by leading publishers and widely reviewed, announced a writer whose wit rarely turned cruel and whose moral assumptions never fully left the pulpit or the lyceum.

A Harper's Voice
By the 1850s Curtis was a familiar presence on the lyceum circuit, a platform orator of poise and clarity. He soon found a durable home in the pages of Harper's. For decades he wrote The Easy Chair, a monthly essay in Harper's Magazine that surveyed literature, manners, and public questions with gentle authority. During and after the Civil War, he became the leading political editorial voice of Harper's Weekly. In that role he worked alongside the illustrator Thomas Nast, whose cartoons seared corrupt power with lines as sharp as Curtis's sentences. The combined moral pressure of pen and pencil helped expose urban graft, most famously in the struggle against Tammany Hall and William M. Tweed, and it offered readers a weekly tutorial in civic character.

War, Union, and Reconstruction
Curtis supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union cause, writing and speaking for the preservation of the republic and the end of slavery. His wartime editorials called for firmness without malice and for a national purpose grounded in equality under law. In the unsettled years of Reconstruction he defended constitutional amendments and federal action to protect citizenship, though he also urged a politics of persuasion that would keep moral suasion at the center of national life. His tone remained independent and reformist, wary of party as an end in itself.

Civil Service Reform
Above all, Curtis became the conscience of the movement to reform the civil service. He believed that the spoils system degraded republican virtue, corrupted institutions, and pushed able citizens away from public work. As president of the National Civil Service Reform League, he worked closely with reformers such as Dorman B. Eaton to build a national coalition, educate voters, and press legislators. His essays explained merit examinations and tenure protections in plain language, arguing that efficiency served morality by making government trustworthy. When the Pendleton Act established federal civil service principles, it did so in a climate that his advocacy had helped create. He kept up the pressure afterward, knowing that laws require guardians.

Independence in Politics
Curtis's political independence often placed him at odds with party leaders. He admired Ulysses S. Grant as a soldier but criticized the acceptance of patronage in peacetime governance. His refusal in 1884 to support James G. Blaine, whose record he found ethically compromised, made him a leading voice among the Mugwumps, the reform Republicans who backed Democrat Grover Cleveland on character grounds. Many friends in the Republican Party were dismayed, but Curtis preferred consistency with his own editorials to camaraderie with party managers. The episode fixed his public image: not a partisan, but a civic teacher using a newspaper to hold power to principle.

Personal Life and Literary Character
Curtis married Anna Shaw, linking him to the Massachusetts Shaw family and to the memory of her brother Robert Gould Shaw, who led the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. The marriage connected Curtis to reform-minded circles in Boston and New York, and the couple made their home on Staten Island, where he wrote, gardened, welcomed visitors, and raised a family. Friends remembered him as urbane and kindly, a man of fastidious taste who disliked cruelty in print. Ralph Waldo Emerson prized his delicacy of mind; editors valued his reliability; younger writers found in him a model of public-spirited authorship. Even when addressing hard questions, he avoided invective, trusting that steady argument and good humor could move an audience further than rage.

Orator and Educator
Across four decades Curtis traveled from town to town on the lecture circuit, filling halls with addresses that colleges reprinted and civic groups saved. He spoke on literature, on the duties of educated citizens, and on the meaning of patriotism in a democratic age. His orations, collected and reissued, became handbooks of public ethics, and he used them to insist that culture is not an ornament but a preparation for responsibility. In print and on the platform, he treated readers and listeners as partners in a long argument about the republic's soul.

Later Years and Death
Curtis worked almost to the end. He continued the Easy Chair essays, steered the opinion pages of Harper's Weekly, and presided over reform meetings even as illness began to slow him. On August 31, 1892, he died on Staten Island. Tributes flowed from colleagues, reformers, and political opponents alike, many recalling the stately cadence of his prose and the incorruptible standard he set for public discussion. Thomas Nast, long his comrade in editorial battle, praised his courage; admirers of civil service reform credited him with turning a technical cause into a moral one; and readers who had grown up with his essays felt they had lost a household friend.

Legacy
George William Curtis left a double bequest. As an author he refined a distinctly American style of the familiar essay, at once conversational and high-minded, embodied in Prue and I and decades of Easy Chair papers. As a citizen he proved that a journalist could be the nation's schoolmaster, that a weekly column could carry the weight of a sermon, and that independence in politics might serve the country better than loyalty to a party. The figures around him help complete the portrait: Emerson encouraging the young writer at Brook Farm; Margaret Fuller widening his horizons; Thomas Nast turning his arguments into indelible images; reformers like Dorman Eaton laboring at his side; and national leaders from Abraham Lincoln to Grover Cleveland feeling the pressure of his measured words. In an era of rapid growth and noisy contention, he stood for the idea that character is policy, and that the written line, well aimed, can bend public life toward honor.

Our collection contains 17 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Love - Learning - Freedom.

Other people realated to George: Charles Dudley Warner (Journalist), Seth Low (Educator), Edwin Percy Whipple (Writer)