30 Facts About George Lippard

George Lippard was a 19th-century American novelist, journalist, playwright, social activist, and labor organizer.

George Lippard founded a secret benevolent society, Brotherhood of the Union, investing in it all the trappings of a religion; the society, a precursor to labor organizations, survived until 1994.

George Lippard authored two principal kinds of stories: Gothic tales about the immorality, horror, vice, and debauchery of large cities, such as The Monks of Monk Hall, reprinted as The Quaker City ; and historical fiction of a type called romances, such as Blanche of Brandywine, Legends of Mexico, and the popular Legends of the Revolution.

George Lippard died at the age of 31 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 9,1854.

George Lippard was born on April 10,1822, in West Nantmeal Township, Pennsylvania, on the farm of his father, Daniel B Lippard.

Young George Lippard grew up in Philadelphia, in Germantown, and Rhinebeck, New York.

George Lippard then commenced employment with the Philadelphia daily newspaper Spirit of the Times.

George Lippard's most notorious book, The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall, is a lurid and thickly plotted expose of city life in antebellum Philadelphia.

Highly anti-capitalistic in its message, George Lippard aimed to expose the hypocrisy of the Philadelphia elite, as well as the darker underside of American capitalism and urbanization.

George Lippard's Philadelphia is populated with parsimonious bankers, foppish drunkards, adulterers, sadistic murderers, reverend rakes, and confidence men, all of whom the author depicts as potential threats to the Republic.

George Lippard employed the seduction aspect of the trial as a metaphor for the oppression of the helpless.

George Lippard took advantage of the popularity of his novel The Quaker City to establish his own weekly periodical, named The Quaker City.

George Lippard advertised it as "A Popular Journal, devoted to such matters of Literature and news as will interest the great mass of readers".

In 1850, George Lippard founded the Brotherhood of the Union, later renamed the Brotherhood of America, a secret benevolent society aiming to eliminate poverty and crime by removing the social ills causing them.

George Lippard was a popular lecturer, journalist, and dramatist, renowned for both the stories he wrote and for his relentless advocacy of social justice.

George Lippard was a participant in the National Reform Congress and the Eighth National Industrial Congress, and in 1850 founded the Brotherhood of the Union.

George Lippard was not immune from some of the particular prejudices of his day.

Later in his career, George Lippard seemed to grow more ambivalent about the war, and in 1851 he published a sketch called "A Sequel to the Legends of Mexico" in which he expressed a concern that the way he depicted the conflict in his novels might "lead young hearts into an appetite for blood-shedding".

George Lippard particularly admired Washington and devoted more pages to him than any other writer of fiction up to that time, though his stories are often sensationalized and immersed in Gothic elements.

That year, George Lippard moved to 965 North Sixth Street, a home in which Poe had used as his final home in Philadelphia before moving to New York.

George Lippard was more reserved about Lippard's artistic merits; possibly Poe's own artistic standards were too high to admit praise of Lippard's writing.

George Lippard's wife died on May 21,1851, shortly after the March death of their infant son.

In 1852, George Lippard spoke in Philadelphia on the 115th birthday of Thomas Paine, attempting to redeem his political legacy and reputation, which had faltered somewhat due to his book The Age of Reason.

George Lippard was caught in a controversy with Philadelphia publisher, who incorrectly claimed that Lippard had agreed to publish exclusively with him.

Always frail, George Lippard suffered from tuberculosis for the last years of his life.

George Lippard died on February 9,1854, at his home, then 1509 Lawrence Street, shortly before attaining the age of 32.

George Lippard achieved substantial commercial success in his lifetime by purposely targeting a young working-class readership by using sensationalism, violence, and social criticism.

George Lippard acknowledged the influence of Charles Brockden Brown on his writing and dedicated several books to him.

George Lippard's writing has occasional glimmers of style, but his words are more memorable for quantity than for quality, and his writing for its financial success than for its literary style.

George Lippard proved that one could make a living by wordsmithing.