essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain
, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
.
Warner was born of Puritan
descent in Plainfield, Massachusetts
. From the ages of six to fourteen he lived in Charlemont, Massachusetts
, the scene of the experiences pictured in his study of childhood, Being a Boy (1877). He then moved to Cazenovia, New York
, and in 1851 graduated from Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
.
He worked with a surveying party in Missouri
; studied law at the University of Pennsylvania
; practiced in Chicago
(1856–1860); was assistant editor (1860) and editor (1861–1867) of The Hartford Press, and after The Press was merged into The Hartford Courant, was co-editor with Joseph R Hawley
; in 1884 he joined the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine
, for which he conducted The Editors Drawer until 1892, when he took charge of The Editor's Study.
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.
A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.
To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch, their renewal of life, this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.
Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it.
No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.
Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back,—with a hinge in it.
Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.
The toad, without which no garden would be complete.