Confederate Portraits by Gamaliel Bradford

Gamaliel Bradford (Born 9 October 1863 in Boston; Died 11 April 1932 in Wellesley) was an American writer. He became particularly well known as a biographer; with a method, he himself called "psychography" he tried to portray the souls of historical personalities in short profiles. Bradford explicitly cited the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve and his biographical method as a model. In his "psychographic" sketches, more than 100 in all, Bradford examined personalities from the most diverse epochs over the years, from Xenophon and Ovid to Casanova, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great, Emily Dickinson and P. T. Barnum. Only in the later work The Quick and the Dead did he try his hand at sketches of living persons (including Theodore Roosevelt, Lenin, and Mussolini). After his biography of Lee, he gave up the essay-like short form only twice for psychographic studies, in particular for Charles Darwin and D. L. Moody; in 1928 he also published a psychoanalytical "The Autobiography of Mankind". Although they have been completely forgotten today, Bradford's biographical works enjoyed great popularity among readers during his lifetime. In 1915 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.His dignified style and uncompromising subject matter - the character and nobility of "great" men and women of world history - made him a popular author, especially in bourgeois circles, although Henry L. Mencken was also among his admirers. Bradford maintained an intensive correspondence with numerous intellectuals, for example with Robert Frost. Shortly after Bradford's death in 1932, Van Wyck Brooks first published a selection from Bradford's comprehensive diary, then a selection of his letters.