Author: WEBSTER, Noah
Biography:
WEBSTER, Noah (1758-1843: ANBO)
The fourth of five children of Mercy (Steele) and Noah Webster, he was born on 16 Oct. 1758 in West Hartford CT. Though both from well established families, his parents were not wealthy; their income depended on their relatively modest farm. They nevertheless managed to send him to Yale (entered 1774, BA 1778). During the Revolutionary War he served for a time as a volunteer in the militia. He then worked as a teacher while training for the law, and was called to the bar in 1781. Finding that his practice was unprofitable, he returned to the classroom. In 1782 he opened an elementary school in Goshen NY. In the wake of the war and in a spirit of nation-building, he produced a reformed spelling-book (1783), grammar (1784), and reader (1785) specifically for American children. In 1783 he returned to Hartford and on 26 Oct. 1789 married Rebecca Greenleaf in Boston; they went on to have eight children, one of whom died in infancy. In the 1790s Webster was more directly involved in politics through journalism as founding editor of the Commercial Advertiser in New York. In 1801 he sold the paper and returned to New Haven CT to work on the culmination of his project of language reform, a dictionary of American English which appeared first in 1806 and then, almost doubled in size, took on its final form in two volumes in 1828. Webster died at home in New Haven on 28 May 1843. The attribution to him of the short pieces of verse and prose in a Philadelphia collection of readings for young people (1813), though not certain, is in keeping with his pedagogical and anthologising work. (ANBO 21 May 2025; ODNB 21 May 2025; findmypast.com 21 May 2025) HJ