Author: Knight, Frederick
Biography:
KNIGHT, Frederick (1791-1849: WBIS)
The younger brother of Henry Cogswell Knight (q.v.) and half-brother of Antonio Knight (q.v.), he was born in Hampton NH. (DAB gives his birthdate as 1790.) His mother Elizabeth (Cogswell) Knight died when he was a year old; his father Joseph Knight remarried, but the second wife died not long after the birth of her son Antonio. When Joseph Knight himself died, about 1797, the two older boys went to live with their maternal grandparents in Rowley MA. Frederick attended Harvard without graduating; he also studied law in Litchfield CT but seems not to have practised. He taught school for a time and found the work uncongenial, so he returned to Rowley to write. He contributed poems to periodicals. He died in Rowley in the home of an elderly widow who took him in in his later years. After his death in impoverished circumstances, a memorial volume of poems and reminiscences, Thorn Cottage (1855), was published in Boston. (Thorn Cottage; DAB under "Knight, Henry Cogswell"; Appleton) HJ