Nathan Haskell Dole



Nathan Haskell Dole (August 31, 1852 – May 9, 1935) was an American poet editor, prose author, and translator. He translated many works of Leo Tolstoy and other Russians; novels of the Spaniard Armando Palacio Valdés (1886–90); and a variety of works from French and Italian.

Life
Nathan Haskell Dole was born August 31, 1852, in Chelsea, Massachusetts He was the second son of his father Reverend Nathan Dole (1811–1855) and mother Caroline (Fletcher) Dole. Dole grew up in the Fletcher homestead, a strict Puritan home, in Norridgewock, Maine, where his grandmother lived and where his mother moved with her two boys after his father died of tuberculosis.

Sophie May wrote her Prudy Books in Norridgewock, which probably showed the sort of life Nathan and his older brother Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927), lived. A newspaper article about Nathan in the Boston Evening Transcript, February 8, 1929, suggested that Nathan, lively from the start, may have offered good material for the mischievous boys who acted as foil for the goody-good ones in the Prudy Books. The same Boston Evening Transcript article said that he was an omnivorous reader, who soon taught himself to read in French, German, Greek and Latin.

Dole studied at the Eaton School in Norridgewock, and then under private tutors. Later he went to the Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy, graduating in 1870, and then to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1874. Years later he received an L.H. Doctorate and Honorary Alumnus from Oglethorp University in Atlanta, Georgia.

After college, Dole taught at De Veaux College from 1874 to 1875, and at Worcester High School from 1875 to 1876. From 1876 to 1878, he was preceptor at Derby Academy, in Hingham, Massachusetts. In 1881, he left teaching to work for the Philadelphia Press, where he was musical art and literary editor until 1878. (For a time his work appeared in both the morning and evening edition of the Press, affording him the opportunity of contradicting in the evening paper what he had said in the morning edition, and vice versa. From 1887 to 1901 he was literary advisor to T. Y. Crowell Publishing Company. He was Secretary of the department of publicity at D. Appleton and Co. for five months in 1901.

In 1892, Dole married Helen James Bennett. They moved to Boston, where he concentrated on writing, translating, editing and lecturing. He and his family lived in Jamaica Plain for many years, spending their summers in Ogunquit, Maine. They were popular members of the Boston social and literary set. Their home was full of both music and literature, and was well known for good conversation at the four o'clock teas every afternoon.

In 1928, when he was seventy-six, they moved to New York City to be near their daughter and grandchildren and lived in Riverdale-on-Hudson.

Dole knew such literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (who was his father's instructor in Bowdoin College), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, Charles Anderson Dana, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, John Greenleaf Whittier, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edward Everett Hale, Julia Ward Howe, Louise Chandler Moulton and many others.

Dole was Associate Editor of The Internal Library of Famous Literature (1890), Flowers from Persia Poets (1901), The Young Folks Library (1902), The Encyclopedia Americana (1905), Vocations (1909-1910; 10 volumes, in collaboration with Pres. Hyde and Caroline Ticknor), the 10th Edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotation, and the Poems of Dr. Samuel S. Curry, with Biography, 1923.

He contributed to the Boston Evening Transcript, The Portland News, The Independent, The New York Times Literary Supplement, and many other magazines.

Dole died May 9, 1935, at Yonkers, New York, of a heart attack.

Poetry

 * The Hawthorn Tree and other poems. 1895.
 * Poem for the Educational Music Courses, 1896.
 * The Pilgrims and other Poems, 1907.

Fiction

 * Not Angela Quite (fiction) 1893.
 * Omar the Tentmaker, A Romance of Old Persia, 1898, in 1921 and 1928.

Non-fiction

 * A Score of Famous Composers (1891-1902-1924) (Enlarged and revised as in 1927.)
 * Young Folks History of Russia, 1881.
 * Joseph Jefferson At Home, 1896.
 * Life of Francis William Bird, 1897.
 * The Mistakes We Make, 1898.
 * Peace and Progress, 1904.
 * The Latin Poets, 1905.
 * The Breviary Treasures (10 Vols.) 1905-1906.
 * The Greek Poets, 1907.
 * Six Italian Essays, 1907.
 * Life of Count Tolstoi (1911)
 * The Spell of Switzerland (1913)
 * Rote Songs for Boston Public Schools, 1915-1916.
 * America in Spitsbergen (two volumes), 1922.

Edited

 * Omar Khayyám. 1896.
 * Leo Tolstoy, Collected Works. 20 volumes, 1899.
 * Poetical Works of Keats and Shelley. 1905.