Author: Leggett, William
Biography:
Leggett, William (1801-39: ANBO)
The son of Abraham and Catherine Wylie Leggett, he was born and raised in New York City and enrolled at (but apparently did not graduate from) Georgetown College in Washington in 1815. He moved to Illinois with the family in 1819; his first poems were published in a newspaper there. He joined the navy in 1822 but was court-martialled for duelling and resigned his commission in 1826. Thereafter he lived in New York as a writer and journalist. He contributed short stories to magazines and critical essays to literary reviews: some of the stories were collected in Tales and Sketches by a Country Schoolmaster (1829) and Naval Stories (1835). In 1828 he married Almira Waring of New Rochelle; there were no children. Two of Leggett's ventures into magazine publishing were short-lived, but he found his métier on the New York Evening Post, where he established a bold political position as an editorial writer and served as acting editor-in-chief in the absence of William Cullen Bryant (q.v.) in 1834-5. He had to leave the Post because of illness and died in New Rochelle NY as he was about to take on a diplomatic post in Guatemala. Leggett's political journalism appeared in a collected edition in 2 vols. in 1840. (ANBO 8 Nov. 2019; Appleton)