William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Leonard (January 25, 1876, in Plainfield, New Jersey – May 2, 1944, in Madison, Wisconsin) was an American poet, playwright, translator, and literary scholar.

William Ellery Channing Leonard was born on the family homestead in Plainfield, New Jersey on January 25, 1876. His parents, admirers of the transcendentalist movement, named him after William Ellery Channing, a mentor to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father, William James Leonard, was a newspaper editor. However, by 1890, he was unable to financially support his family with this profession. Three years later, he returned to ministry. He accepted an appointment with a Unitarian church in Bolton's Landing, Massachusetts and moved the family there. He joined Phineas Quimby's New Thought movement and left the Unitarian church in 1898. Leonard's mother, Mattie, was a proponent of the pseudoscientific study of graphology and taught kindergarten. Leonard attended his mother's class for five years, studied with his father at home, and did not enter public school until he was nine.

During his adolescence, Leonard gained an appreciation for literature. Frustrated that his impoverished parents could not afford college, Leonard took a job out of high school as a door-to-door salesman. On a day off, he took a trip to Boston to visit the Massachusetts Genealogical Society. However, his guidebook had the wrong address and Leonard instead wound up at the College of Liberal Arts at Boston University. A clerk invited Leonard to speak with the dean of the school, who offered Leonard a tuition scholarship. Leonard wrote over 200 poems while in school, and his "Parson Moody's Prayer" was published in The Century Magazine in 1899. He was also the editor of the university biweekly newspaper, the University Beacon.

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