Author: CALVERT, George Henry
Biography:
CALVERT, George Henry (1803-89: WBIS)
Calvert was born into a distinguished family: his paternal grandfather Benedict Calvert had been a close friend of Washington's and his mother, Rosalie Eugenia Stier of Antwerp--a direct descendant of Rubens--was the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat who had come to America in 1794 to escape Napoleon's army. (Her Plantation Letters, written from the family home, Riversdale, were published in 1991.) He attended Harvard from 1819 to 1823, spent 15 months in Göttingen, and met Goethe in Weimar. After returning to settle in Baltimore in 1827, he became the editor of the Baltimore American. In 1829 he married Elizabeth Steuart, and in 1830 was appointed Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Baltimore. As a writer he had a miscellaneous career, publishing translations, essays, travels, literary biography, and some fiction, but most of his work and all his original verse dates from 1840 and later. (ANBO 11 Feb. 2018) HJ