William Cullen Bryant

(1794 - 1878)

Declared by James Fenimore Cooper to be “the author of America,” the poet William Cullen Bryant began translating and publishing Latin poems by the age of ten and was admitted to the bar at twenty-one. He worked as a lawyer before becoming editor in 1827 of the New-York Evening Post, a position he held for fifty years, advocating for abolition and endorsing Abraham Lincoln for president. In a 1957 speech on voting rights, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “There is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying: Truth crushed to earth will rise again.”