Hutchins Hapgood

Hutchins Harry Hapgood (May 21, 1869, Chicago – November 19, 1944, Provincetown, Massachusetts) was an American journalist, author and anarchist.

Hutchins Hapgood in 1933. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten [1]

Life and career

Hapgood was born to Charles Hutchins Hapgood (1836–1917) and Fanny Louise (Powers) Hapgood (1846–1922) and grew up in Alton, Illinois, where his father was a wealthy manufacturer of farming equipment. He is the younger brother of the journalist and diplomat Norman Hapgood. After a year at the University of Michigan, he transferred to Harvard University, where he took a B.A. in 1892 and earned his Masters in 1897. Two of the intervening years were spent studying sociology and philosophy at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg, Germany. At first, he became a teacher of English composition at Harvard and the University of Chicago, but was eventually inspired by his older brother, Norman to pursue a career in journalism.[2]

He obtained his first employment with the New York Commercial Advertiser (later known as the New York Globe). His mentor there was Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking reporter. On June 22, 1899, he married Neith Boyce, Steffens' assistant and a journalist in her own right. In 1904, when the Advertiser was revamped as the Globe, he went back to Chicago for a time and became the drama critic for the Chicago Evening Post. Returning to New York, he spent much of his career as an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post, the Press, and the Globe.[3]

Following the deaths of his father in 1917 and his eldest son Boyce (in the 1918 flu epidemic), Hapgood's career began to decline. A few years later, general disillusionment over the decadence of the postwar world led him to retire. Hapgood died on November 19, 1944, in Provincetown and was buried in the family plot in East Cemetery, Petersham, Massachusetts.

Works
  • Paul Jones (1901) OCLC 613148935
  • The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York (1902, reissued by Belknap Press, 1983. ISBN 0-674-83266-3)
  • The Autobiography of a Thief (1903)
  • The Spirit of Labor (1907, reissued by the University of Illinois Press, 2004. ISBN 0-252-07187-5)
  • Types from City Streets (1910, reissued by Garret Press, 1970. ISBN 0-512-00759-4)
  • An Anarchist Woman (Novel, 1909)
  • The Story of a Lover (1919) Published anonymously. A frank account of his open marriage.
  • A Victorian in the Modern World (Autobiography, 1939, reissued by the University of Washington Press, 1972: ISBN 0-295-95183-4)

References
  1. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number LC-USZ62-132955]
  2. Biographical Essay by Dowling, Robert M. American Writers, Supplement XVII. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008
  3. David Minter, "Hutchins Hapgood," American National Biography, NY: Oxford University, 10 (1999): 34-5. Biographical entry.


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