91 Facts About John Neal

John Neal was an American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist.

The first American author to use natural diction and a pioneer of colloquialism, John Neal was the first to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch in a US work of fiction.

John Neal attained his greatest literary achievements between 1817 and 1835, during which time he was America's first daily newspaper columnist, the first American published in British literary journals, author of the first history of American literature, America's first art critic, a short story pioneer, a children's literature pioneer, and a forerunner of the American Renaissance.

John Neal was the first American to establish a public gymnasium in the US and championed athletics to regulate violent tendencies with which he himself had struggled throughout his life.

John Neal is considered an author without a masterpiece, though his short stories are his highest literary achievements and ranked with the best of his age.

John Neal's mother, described by former pupil Elizabeth Oakes Smith as a woman of "clear intellect, and no little self-reliance and independence of will", made up the lost family income by establishing her own school and renting rooms in her home to boarders.

John Neal received assistance from the siblings' unmarried uncle, James Neal, and others in their Quaker community.

John Neal grew up in "genteel poverty", attending his mother's school, a Quaker boarding school, and the public school in Portland.

John Neal felt indebted to this "high-minded, generous, unselfish" association of "intellectual and companionable" people for many of the happy memories and employment connections he enjoyed in Baltimore.

John Neal resolved that "there was nothing left for me but authorship, or starvation, if I persisted in my plan of studying law".

John Neal was admitted to the bar and started practicing law in Baltimore in 1820.

John Neal published one novel in 1822 and three more the following year, eventually rising to the status of James Fenimore Cooper's chief rival for recognition as America's leading novelist.

Whether it had more to do with Smith or Pinkney, John Neal took less than a month after that dinner date to settle his affairs in Baltimore and secure passage on a ship bound for the UK on December 15,1823.

John Neal followed Irving's precedent of using temporary residence in London to earn more money and notoriety from the British literary market.

London publishers had already pirated Seventy-Six and Logan, but John Neal hoped those companies would pay him to publish Errata and Randolph if he were present to negotiate.

Blackwood provided the platform for John Neal's earliest written works on gender and women's rights and published Brother Jonathan, but a back-and-forth over manuscript revisions in autumn 1825 soured the relationship and John Neal was without a source of income.

John Neal spent the next year and a half writing for Bentham's Westminster Review.

John Neal left the UK having caught the attention of the British literary elite, published the novel he brought with him, and "succeeded to perfection" in educating the British about American institutions, habits, and prospects.

John Neal returned to the United States from Europe in June 1827 with plans to settle in New York City, but stopped first in his native Portland to visit his mother and sister.

John Neal defiantly resolved to settle in Portland instead of New York.

John Neal became a proponent in the US of athletics he had practiced abroad, including Friedrich Jahn's early Turnen gymnastics and boxing and fencing techniques he learned in Paris, London, and Baltimore.

John Neal opened Maine's first gymnasium in 1827, making him the first American to establish a public gym in the US.

John Neal offered lessons in boxing and fencing in his law office.

In 1828, John Neal established The Yankee magazine with himself as editor, and continued publication through the end of 1829.

John Neal used its pages to vindicate himself to fellow Portlanders, critique American art and drama, host a discourse on the nature of New Englander identity, advance his developing feminist ideas, and encourage new literary voices, most of them women.

John Neal edited many other periodicals between the late 1820s and the mid 1840s and was during this time a highly sought-after contributor on a variety of topics.

John Neal published three novels from material he produced in London and focused his new creative writing efforts on a body of short stories that represents his greatest literary achievement.

John Neal published an average of one tale per year between 1828 and 1846, helping to shape the relatively new short story genre.

John Neal began traveling as a lecturer in 1829, reaching the height of his influence in the women's rights movement in 1843 when he was delivering speeches before large crowds in New York City and reaching wider audiences through the press.

In 1828, John Neal married his second cousin Eleanor Hall and together they had five children between 1829 and 1847.

Also in 1836 he received an honorary master's degree from Bowdoin College, the same institution at which John Neal made a living as a self-employed teenage penmanship instructor and that later educated the more economically privileged Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

John Neal began developing and managing local real estate, operating multiple granite quarries, developing railroad connections to Portland, and investing in land speculation in Cairo, Illinois.

John Neal led the movement to incorporate Portland as a city and build the community's first parks and sidewalks.

John Neal became interested in architecture, interior design, and furniture design, developing pioneering, simple, and functional solutions that influenced other designers outside his local area.

At the urging of Longfellow and other friends, John Neal returned to novel writing late in life, publishing True Womanhood in 1859.

John Neal died on June 20,1876, and was buried in the Neal family plot in Portland's Western Cemetery.

John Neal's writing both reflects and challenges shifting American ways of life over those years.

John Neal started his career as an American reading public was just beginning to emerge, working immediately and consistently within the nation's developing "complex web of print culture".

John Neal is often considered an influential American literary figure with no masterpiece of his own.

John Neal's voice was one of many following the War of 1812 calling for an American literary nationalism, but John Neal felt his colleagues' work relied too much on British conventions.

John Neal used literary criticism in magazines and novels to encourage desired changes in the field and to uplift new writers, most of them women.

John Neal dismissed almost all of the 120 authors he critiqued in that series as derivative of their British predecessors.

John Neal used his role as critic, particularly in the pages of his magazine The Yankee, to draw attention to newer writers in whose work he saw promise.

John Neal published an average of one per year between 1828 and 1846, helping to shape the relatively new short story genre, particularly early children's literature.

John Neal wrote Brother Jonathan in Baltimore, but revised and published it in London in 1825.

John Neal published Rachel Dyer, Authorship, and The Down-Easters while living in Portland, Maine, but all are reworkings of content he wrote in London.

When it was released in 1823, John Neal was at the height of his prominence as a novelist, being at the time the chief rival of leading American author, James Fenimore Cooper.

John Neal was the first American art critic, though he did not receive this recognition until the twentieth century.

The positive attention John Neal paid to American portrait painters trained in the "humbler contingencies" of sign painting and applied arts was accompanied by his acknowledgment of the artist's often conflicting priorities: preserving likeness of the subject without offending the customer.

John Neal was unique in his effort in this period to raise the status of engraving as fine art, paying particular attention to engraved paintings published in The Token and The Atlantic Souvenir annual gift books.

The bulk of John Neal's poetry was published in The Portico while studying law in Baltimore.

John Neal's only bound collection of poems is Battle of Niagara, A Poem, without Notes; and Goldau, or the Maniac Harper, published in 1818.

Poems by John Neal are featured in Specimens of American Poetry edited by Samuel Kettell, The Poets and Poetry of America edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, and American Poetry from the Beginning to Whitman edited by Louis Untermeyer.

John Neal wrote Otho hoping it would see production with Thomas Abthorpe Cooper in the lead, but Cooper showed no interest.

The play was written in verse and heavily inspired by the works of Lord Byron; John Pierpont considered it too dense and wrote to Neal that it needed "a sky-light or two" cut into it.

John Neal brought the script with him to London with plans to revise it and have it produced for the stage while he was there, but he never achieved that goal.

John Neal found his first two positions as editor through fellow members of the Delphian Club in Baltimore.

Between 1829 and 1848, John Neal supplemented his income as a lecturer.

John Neal used the principles of the American Revolution to attack slavery as an affront to liberty, and female disfranchisement and coverture as taxation without representation.

John Neal's most well-attended and influential address was the 1843 "Rights of Women" speech at New York City's largest auditorium at the time, the Broadway Tabernacle.

Additionally, John Neal was heavily involved in William Henry Harrison's 1840 presidential campaign, which almost resulted in his appointment as a district attorney.

John Neal promoted the pseudoscience movements phrenology, animal magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance.

John Neal was America's first women's rights lecturer and one of the first male advocates of women's rights and feminist causes in the US.

John Neal supported female writers and organizers, affirmed intellectual equality between men and women, fought coverture laws against women's economic rights, and demanded suffrage, equal pay, and better education for women.

John Neal's early focus on female education was primarily influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as well as works by Catharine Macaulay and Judith Sargent Murray.

John Neal delivered America's first women's rights lecture as an Independence Day address in Portland, Maine in 1832.

John Neal declared that under coverture and without suffrage, women were victims of the same crime of taxation without representation that caused the Revolutionary War.

John Neal reached the peak of his influence on feminist issues at the time of his "Rights of Women" speech before a crowd of 3,000 people in New York City.

The "Rights of Women" speech was widely covered, albeit dismissed, by the press, and John Neal printed it later that year in the pages of Brother Jonathan magazine, of which he was editor.

John Neal used that magazine in 1843 to publish his own essays calling for equal pay and better workplace conditions for women, and to host a printed debate of correspondence on the merits of women's suffrage between himself and Eliza W Farnham.

For twenty years following his work with Brother Jonathan magazine, John Neal wrote about women almost exclusively in fiction but only occasionally about feminist issues in periodicals.

John Neal mused about crossdressing and the performative nature of gender in "Masquerading", "one of the most interesting essays of his career".

John Neal followed this with two women's rights essays for the American Phrenological Journal, the women's rights chapter of his autobiography, and twelve articles in The Revolution.

John Neal became prominently involved as an organizer in the women's suffrage movement following the Civil War, finding influence in local, regional, and national organizations.

John Neal cofounded the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, organized Portland's first public meeting on women's suffrage in 1870, and cofounded Maine's first statewide Woman Suffrage Association in 1873.

John Neal supported the American Colonization Society, founding the Portland, Maine local chapter in 1833, serving as its secretary, and later meeting with Liberia's first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts.

John Neal likely avoided the movement for "immediate, unconditional, and universal emancipation" because of a long-standing feud with William Lloyd Garrison.

In fiction, John Neal explored the differences between Northern and Southern prejudices against Black Americans, particularly in The Down-Easters.

John Neal published essays, novels, and short stories to advocate the rights of American Indians.

John Neal used novels like Logan to challenge racial boundaries between White and Indigenous Americans.

John Neal did not associate himself with the temperance movement until after he returned to Portland, Maine, from London.

Neal Dow, John Neal's cousin, was a leader of the prohibition movement, and in 1836 Neal engaged in public debates with his cousin to defend moderate wine drinking as an alternative to total abstinence.

John Neal's Quaker upbringing likely instilled in him an aversion to "worldly titles" he said were unfitting in republican society.

John Neal made his earliest arguments against lotteries in Baltimore newspapers as a law apprentice, then in Logan.

John Neal began his campaign against public executions after witnessing one in Baltimore.

John Neal attacked capital punishment by writing in newspapers, magazines, novels, and debates, achieving national influence in the US and reaching a more limited audience in the UK.

John Neal became active in bankruptcy law reform shortly after his own bankruptcy in 1816.

John Neal continued by attacking the policy of imprisonment for debt in his Baltimore novels and in American and British newspapers later in the 1820s.

American literature scholar Theresa A Goddu concluded that Neal had been canonized as "half wildman, half genius".

Contemporaries and scholars of John Neal alike are disposed to lament his inability to achieve what others saw as the potential of his abilities.

John Neal further argued that Neal's ability to influence such disparate figures as Poe and Whitman demonstrates the weight of his work.