Author: TUFTS, Marshall
Biography:
TUFTS, Marshall (1802-55: ancestry.com)
He was born in Lexington MA, the son of Thomas and Rebecca (Adams) Tufts--not a close relation (if any) of the Charles Tufts of Medford MA (1781-1876) who donated the land for Tufts College. He graduated AB from Harvard in 1827; a significant event of his undergraduate years had been the Great Rebellion of 1823 which led to reforms in the curriculum and grading system. He went on to Harvard Divinity School but was never ordained. Instead of going into the church, he attempted to make his way as an independent writer. As "A. M.," he first published, in Boston, an attack on university education under the title A Tour through College. (This work is said to have inspired H. D. Thoreau and his classmates in their own riots at Harvard in 1834.) Unable to find a publisher who would accept other proposals, he himself published a reprint and four other works on various subjects in 1833, followed by his verse translation of Homer in 1834. In 1836 he became joint owner and editor of a newspaper in New Hampshire that he renamed as the Great Falls Journal. He does not seem ever to have married. He was living in Lexington again at the time of his death. (ancestry.com 29 Nov. 2020; Village Journal [Somersworth NH] 14 May 1836; Randall Conrad, "'Unerring Metaphor': A Culture War in Thoreau's Day," Thoreau Society Bulletin no. 268 [2009] 3-6) HJ