He was born into a Boston family as the youngest of seven siblings—six brothers and one sister.[2] His siblings included David Coit Scudder and Samuel Hubbard Scudder, and his niece was scholar and reformer Vida Dutton Scudder. He graduated from Boston Latin School alongside Henry Adams in 1854. His Congregationalist family made him attend Williams College due to its conservative orthodox religious values, though Scudder became more interested in studying literature rather than religion.[3] After his graduation in 1858, he taught school in New York City, and subsequently, returned to Boston and devoted himself to literary work.
He is best known for his children's books. He published the Bodley Books (1875–87) and was also an essayist, and produced large quantities of journalism that was printed anonymously. He was a correspondent of Hans Christian Andersen and biographer of James Russell Lowell. He edited Riverside Magazine For Young People (1867 to 1870), where several Andersen fairy tales were published for the first time.
Scudder also prepared, with Mrs. Taylor, the Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor (1884) and was series editor for the extensive "American Commonwealths Series" as well as the "Riverside Literature Series" for Houghton Mifflin, where he also worked as literary advisor for several years.[2]
Scudder may have been most famous for his 1884 work A History of the United States of America Preceded By a Narrative of the Discovery and Settlement of North America and of the Events Which Led to the Independence of the Thirteen English Colonies for the Use of Schools and Academies, which long set the standard for American history textbooks.
Scudder served as editor of the prestigious The Atlantic Monthly from 1890 to 1898. Only a couple months into his role as editor, on August 28, 1890, Scudder received from William Dean Howells a submission written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. He quickly rejected the story, later published as "The Yellow Wallpaper", telling Gilman, "I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!"[4] His predecessor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, was not impressed by Scudder's tenure and joked with the pun that Horace Scudder was greater than Moses because "Moses dried up the Red Sea once only; Scudder dries up The Atlantic monthly."[5]
A History of the United States of America Preceded By a Narrative of the Discovery and Settlement of North America and of the Events Which Led to the Independence of the Thirteen English Colonies for the Use of Schools and Academies (1884 and later editions)
^Marcus, Leonard S. Minders of Make-believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008: 38. ISBN978-0-395-67407-9
^Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of "The Yellow Wall-Paper". New York: Oxford University Press, 2010: 188. ISBN978-0-19-973980-6
^Goodman, Susan. Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers 1857–1925. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011: 163. ISBN978-1-58465-985-3
Works by or about Horace Elisha ScudderatWikisource
Media related to Horace Scudder at Wikimedia Commons
