Author: Sands, Robert C.
Biography:
SANDS, Robert Charles (1799-1832: ancestry.com)
The son of Cornelia (Lott) and Comfort Sands, he was born in New York City, proved an able student, and graduated AB from Columbia in 1815. At college he formed the first of several sets of close literary friendships, this time with James Wallis Eastburn (q.v.) and two others who joined in producing the first of Sands's periodical ventures. After graduating he studied law and was called to the bar in New York in 1820. In the meantime he had brought out, anonymously, The Bridal of Vaumond (published by Eastburn), which had poor reviews; and had completed a work left unfinished at his death by Eastburn, Yamoyden, in which Sands's contribution was recognized and appreciated. He was offered but declined a professorship of belles lettres at Dickinson College. He gradually spent less time at his legal practise and more in composition and editorial tasks. He was editor of the Atlantic Magazine (1824-5), assistant to William Cullen Bryant (q.v.) on the New York Review (1825-6), and one of the editorial staff of the New York Commercial Advertiser (1827-32). G. C. Verplanck (q.v.), who wrote the unsigned long memoir of Sands that appeared in the posthumous edition of his Writings (1834) and that is the basis of all later accounts of his life, was his collaborator, along with Bryant, in an annual, The Talisman, to which he contributed from 1828 to 1829: Verplanck's affectionate memoir pays tribute to the model of "joint-stock authorship, of which Mr. Sands was so fond." Sands never married. He died suddenly of an "apoplectic stroke" as he sat writing in the family house at Hoboken. (ancestry.com 27 Aug. 2020; Sands, Writings [2nd edn. 1835]; DAB; Appleton) HJ