HOWE, JULIA WARD (1819-191o), American author and reformer, was born in New York City, May 27, 1819, and died at her summer home, Oak Glen, in Rhode Island, Oct. 17, 1910. The only woman to be honoured by election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mrs. Howe probably owed this distinction to her stirring Civil War poem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic (published first in the Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1862). Although this is the piece with which her name will ever be asso ciated, Mrs. Howe was one of the most active and versatile personalities of her day. She wrote poetry from her childhood, the most complete collection of it being From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New (1898) . She studied, wrote, lectured on German philosophy, did some editorial work, advocated abolition, preached occasionally from Unitarian pulpits, was one of the organizers of the American Woman-Suffrage Association, and was a zealous worker for the advancement of women, for prison reform, for world peace and for other humanitarian movements. Her father, Samuel Ward, was a banker; her mother, Julia Rush Cutler Ward, a poet of some ability; her husband, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a distinguished philanthropist and pioneer in the education of the blind and the feeble-minded. Her five children in turn made names for themselves in the educational and literary world.
Mrs. Howe's dramatic experiments were failures, and the most of her books of travel and essays have been forgotten. Her biographical works, like her poetry, remain of interest: A Memoir of Dr. Samuel G. Howe (1876), Margaret Fuller (1883), Sketches of Representative Women of New England (1905), and her own Reminiscences (1899) . A selection from her speeches and essays has been made by her daughter, Florence Howe Hall, under the title Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement (1913) ; and a selection from Mrs. Howe's journals has been made by her daughter, Laura E. Richards, under the title The Walk with God (i919). Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott published Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (2 vols., 1915 ; and one vol., 1925).