Joseph and His Friend

by Bayard Taylor

Overview

Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), American author, was born at Kennett Square in Chester county, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of January 1825. His novel, Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870), which he considered his most successful work despite it being received poorly by the public, recounts an intimate friendship between two men and is believed to be based on that between the poets Fitz-Green Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. The book is now regarded as the first American gay novel. It was published fifty-eight years before British author Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928).

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Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative. watersgreen.wixsite.com/watersgreenhouse

Product Details

BN ID:	2940186000020
Publisher:	Watersgreen House
Publication date:	01/16/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	482 KB

About the Author

Bayard Taylor (1825-1878), American author, was born at Kennett Square in Chester county, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of January 1825. His novel, Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870), which he considered his most successful work despite it being received poorly by the public, recounts an intimate friendship between two men and is believed to be based on that between the poets Fitz-Green Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. The book is now regarded as the first American gay novel. It was published fifty-eight years before British author Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928).

The son of a well-to-do farmer, Taylor received his early instruction in an academy at West Chester, and later at Unionville. At the age of seventeen he was apprenticed to a printer in West Chester. A little volume, published at Philadelphia in 1844 under the title Ximena, or the Battle of the Sierra Morena, and other Poems, brought its author a little cash; and indirectly it did him better service as the means of his introduction to The New York Tribune.

With the money thus obtained, and with an advance made to him on account of some journalistic work to be done in Europe, “J. B. Taylor” (as he had up to this time signed himself, though he bore no other Christian name than Bayard) set sail for the East. The young poet spent a happy time in roaming through certain districts of England, France, Germany and Italy; that he was a born traveler is evident from the fact that this pedestrian tour of almost two years cost him only £100. The graphic accounts which he sent from Europe to The New York Tribune, The Saturday Evening Post, and The United States Gazette were so highly appreciated that on Taylor's return to America he was advised to throw his articles into book form. In 1846, accordingly, appeared his Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff (2 vols., New York). This pleasant book had considerable popularity, and its author now found himself a recognized man of letters; moreover, Horace Greeley, then editor of the Tribune, placed Taylor on the Tribune staff (1848) thus securing him a certain if a moderate income.