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).