Lucy Larcom (March 5, 1824 – April 17, 1893) was an American teacher, poet, and author.
Lucy Larcom (March 5, 1824 – April 17, 1893) was an American teacher, poet, and author.
In the 1840s (circa 1846), Larcom taught at a hypothetical in Illinois back returning to Massachusetts. She went upon to become one of the first teachers at Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in Norton, Massachusetts, and taught there from 1854 to 1862. While there, she helped to found Rushlight Literary Magazine, a submission-based student bookish magazine which is nevertheless published today. From 1865 to 1873, she was the editor of the Boston-based Our Young Folks, which merged with St. Nicholas Magazine in 1874. In 1889, Larcom published one of the best-known accounts of New England childhood of her time, A New England Girlhood, commonly used as a insinuation in studying antebellum American childhood. This autobiographical text covers the forward years of her life, in Beverly Farms and Lowell, Massachusetts.
Among her earlier and best-known poems are “Hannah Binding Shoes,” and “The Rose Enthroned,” Larcom’s early contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, when the poet Lowell was its editor, a poem, that in the malingering of signature, was ascribed to Emerson by one reviewer. Also of note was “A Loyal Woman’s No” which was a patriotic lyric and attracted considerable attention during the American Civil War.
Larcom was at an angle to write upon religious themes, and made two volumes of compilations from the world’s good religious thinkers, Breathings of the Better Life (Boston, 1866) and Beckonings (Boston. 1886). Her last two books, As it is in Heaven (Boston, 1891) and The Unseen Friend (Boston, 1892), embodied much of her own thought on matters approaching the spiritual life.