elisa_rolle (elisa_rolle) wrote,
elisa_rolle
elisa_rolle

Frederick Wadsworth Loring (December 12, 1848 – November 5, 1871)

Frederick Wadsworth Loring (December 12, 1848 – November 5, 1871) was an American journalist, novelist and poet. Loring was born on December 12, 1848, in Boston, Massachusetts to David and Mary Hall Stodder Loring. He was a fifth great grandson to immigrant Thomas Loring. He attended Phillips Academy, Andover, Class of 1866, and then Harvard University, where he first made his mark with contributions to the Harvard Advocate. He graduated in 1870. Inheriting a love of literature from his mother, who died when he was eleven, he quickly gained in stature as an up-and-coming American author. In 1871, he published a novel, Two College Friends, and a book of poems, The Boston Dip and Other Verses. Two College Friends, which featured highly charged scenes of young men in battle during the Civil War, has been singled out as an important work in the history of romantic male friendship. His characters, Tom ("soft, curling brown hair, deep blue eyes and dazzling complexion") and Ned ("the complexion is olive, the eyes brown., the lips strongly cut"), fall in love in school and eventually go off to war together. In a torrid scene at the novel's end, Ned visits Tom, who is lying wounded in a military hospital:
"O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me... O Tom, my darling! don't forget it. If you knew how I love you, how I have loved you in all my jealous, morbid moods, in all my exacting selfishness, -
O Tom, my darling, my darling!"
He also made numerous journalistic and creative contributions to such periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly, Appletons' Journal, Old and New, the Independent and Every Saturday during this time.

In the spring of 1871, Appleton's Journal sent him as a correspondent to Arizona on an expedition to be led by Lt. George M. Wheeler. The articles he wrote for the journal included "a Council of War," "a Glimpse of Mormonism," "Silver Mining in Nevada," and "the Valley of Death." Their party suffered several setbacks, and in August 1871, Loring wrote to his employers from Death Valley, "I am bootless, coatless, everything but lifeless. I have had a fortnight of horrors. This morning an Indian fight capped the climax. However, I am well and cheerful." Although they escaped from the valley, his party's carriage was attacked on November 5 by a band of Yapavai near Wickenburg, Arizona, while on the way to La Paz in an ambush that came to be known as the Wickenburg massacre. The driver, Loring, and four other passengers were killed.

After his death, he was mourned by Charles Reade as having been the most promising of all young American authors. Several of Loring's poems, such as "In the Old Churchyard at Fredericksburg" and "the Old Professor," were posthumously included in American verse anthologies.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Wadsworth_Loring

Further Readings:

Two College Friends (Classic Reprint) by Frederic W. Loring
Paperback: 166 pages
Publisher: Forgotten Books (August 12, 2012)
Language: English
ASIN: B0093TJ7LM
Amazon: Two College Friends

Indignation at my dedicating this book to you will be useless, since I am at present three thousand miles out of your reach. Moreover, this dedication is not intended as a public monument to our friendship; I know too much for that. If that were the case, we should manage to quarrel even at this distance, I am quite confident, before the proof-sheets had left the press. But I can dedicate it to you alone of all my college friends, because you and I were brought so especially into the atmosphere of the man who inspired me to undertake it, the man to whom, under God, I shall owe most of what grace and culture I may ever acquire. You and I know his wonderful unselfishness, his tender, sympathy, his exquisite delicacy of thought and life, as well as others know his wit and his scholarship.

More LGBT History at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Gay Classics


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