biography
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1750–1831)
|
| biography:
| Poet and lawyer, born in Watertown, Connecticut, USA, the second cousin of Jonathan Trumbull. Extremely precocious as a child, he studied at Yale (1767 BA; 1770 MA) and taught there (1771–3). He then studied law with John Adams (1773), practised law in New Haven and Hartford (1774–1825), and was a judge of the Connecticut state courts (1801–19). He was associated with the ‘Hartford (or Connecticut) Wits’, an informal group, Federalist in their politics but promoting a new American spirit in their writing. Although he published a number of satirical essays and poems, he is known today solely for one work, M'Fingal (1775–82), a burlesque epic poem satirizing the pro-British Tories in America. |
|
|
