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Seba Smith (September 14, 1792 – July 28, 1868) was an American humorist and writer. He was married to
* ''The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing, of Downingville, Away Down East in the State of Maine'' (Under pseudonym, Major Jack Downing.) (1833)
* ''John Smith's Letters With "Picters" to Match'' (1839)
* ''Powhatan: A Metrical Romance in Seven Cantos'' (1841)
* ''May-Day in New-York; or, House-Hunting and Moving...''(Later published under the title ''Jack Downing's Letters''.) (1845)
* ''Dew-Drops of the Nineteenth Century'', ed. (1846)
* ''New Elements of Geometry'' (1850)
* ''Way Down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life'' (1854)
* ''My Thirty Years Out of the Senate'' (Under pseudonym, Major Jack Downing.) (1859)
* ''The Great Republic,'' ed. (1859)
Seba Smith (September 14, 1792 – July 28, 1868) was an American humorist and writer. He was married to Elizabeth Oakes Smith
Elizabeth Oakes Smith ( Prince; August 12, 1806 – November 16, 1893) was a poet, fiction writer, editor, lecturer, and women's rights activist whose career spanned six decades, from the 1830s to the 1880s. Most well-known at the start of her ...
, also a writer, and he was the father of Appleton Oaksmith.
Biography
Born inBuckfield, Maine
Buckfield is a town in Oxford County, Maine, United States. Buckfield is included in the Lewiston- Auburn, Maine metropolitan New England City and Town Area. It is a member of Regional School Unit 10 along with nearby Hartford and Sumner. The ...
, Smith graduated from Bowdoin College in 1818 and then lived in Portland, Maine
Portland is the largest city in the U.S. state of Maine and the seat of Cumberland County. Portland's population was 68,408 in April 2020. The Greater Portland metropolitan area is home to over half a million people, the 104th-largest metropo ...
. He edited various papers, including the ''Eastern Argus
The Eastern Argus was a newspaper published in Portland, Maine, United States from 1803 to January 1921. In early 1921, it was succeeded by the Portland Press Herald.
History
The newspaper was founded by Calvin Day and Nathaniel Willis. Its ...
'', and founded the ''Portland Courier'', which he edited from 1830 to 1837.
He was one of the first writers to use American vernacular in humor, likely inspired by writer and critic John Neal. His series with the New England character ''Major Jack Downing'' was popular after its start in 1830.
Under date of November 26, 1833, John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams (; July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, and diarist who served as the sixth president of the United States, from 1825 to 1829. He previously served as the eighth United States ...
records in his diary an encounter with Colonel David Crockett
David Crockett (August 17, 1786 – March 6, 1836) was an American folk hero, frontiersman, soldier, and politician. He is often referred to in popular culture as the "King of the Wild Frontier". He represented Tennessee in the U.S. House of ...
, newly returned to Congress, whom he quotes as saying that he (Crockett) "had taken for lodgings two rooms on the first floor of a boarding-house, where he expected to pass the winter and to have for a fellow-lodger Major Jack Downing, the only person in whom he had any confidence for information of what the Government was doing."
His dry, satirical humor influenced other 19th century humorists, including Artemus Ward and Finley Peter Dunne
Finley Peter Dunne (born Peter Dunne; July 10, 1867 – April 24, 1936) was an American humorist, journalist and writer from Chicago. In 1898 Dunne published ''Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War'', a collection of his nationally syndicated Mr. Dooley ...
. He is also credited as being a forerunner of other American humorists like Will Rogers. He also penned the American folk ballad " Young Charlotte".
Select publications
* ''The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing, of Downingville, Away Down East in the State of Maine'' (Under pseudonym, Major Jack Downing.) (1833)
* ''John Smith's Letters With "Picters" to Match'' (1839)
* ''Powhatan: A Metrical Romance in Seven Cantos'' (1841)
* ''May-Day in New-York; or, House-Hunting and Moving...''(Later published under the title ''Jack Downing's Letters''.) (1845)
* ''Dew-Drops of the Nineteenth Century'', ed. (1846)
* ''New Elements of Geometry'' (1850)
* ''Way Down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life'' (1854)
* ''My Thirty Years Out of the Senate'' (Under pseudonym, Major Jack Downing.) (1859)
* ''The Great Republic,'' ed. (1859)
References
*Further reading
*White, Jonathan W. (2023). ''Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade''. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.External links
* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Seba 1792 births 1868 deaths American humorists Bowdoin College alumni People from Buckfield, Maine Writers from Portland, Maine