Word: greenslet
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Rumor is that Lowells talk only to Cabots; they have also apparently talked freely to Ferris Greenslet, former Houghton Mifflin editor-in-chief, and granted him permission to quote from family letters and papers. The, result is a short history of ten Lowell generations, down to and including that of the stout, imperious maiden lady who admired Keats and smoked long Manila cigars...
Good, Noble, Occasionally Mistaken. Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was the Poetess-Pontifex. She once told Author Greenslet, "Ferris, you are a dear good boy, but you don't know a thing about biography, not a God damned Thing.'" Author Greenslet knows enough, at any rate, to have written a highly readable series of biographical sketches. In tone they are semi-official and rather adoring; apparently Lowells are rarely inspired by anything less than noble impulses and a passion for good works, though now & then they may make "mistakes." But at that, they are an interesting lot. Among them...
...Francis Cabot Lowell, Harvard 1793, half-brother of "Rebel" John. He went into trade: cotton-cloth manufacturing. Greenslet calls him "the first educated man ... to expend his whole energy in organizing and improving the industry." Lowell, Mass, is named...
...James Russell Lowell, Harvard 1838, son of another half-brother of "Rebel" John, and today the best known of the family. He was nevertheless its "problem child" because he married outside the Brahmin caste and had Abolitionist leanings. Author Greenslet is lukewarm about J.R.L.'s writings: "The truth is that, for all the ten volumes of his Collected Works, [he] never wrote a book. He only put newspaper and magazine contributions, poems, speeches and lectures together...
...Colonel Charles Russell Lowell, Harvard 1854, nephew of J.R.L., killed in action in 1864 at Cedar Creek, Va., an engagement in which Captain William McKinley and Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes also fought. Had Lowell survived, suggests Greenslet, he might have been a better bet for the White House than either, and "Massachusetts would have had a president midway between John Quincy Adams and Calvin Coolidge...