Warner, Charles Dudley

Charles Dudley (1829-1900), an American editor and writer. He was a native of Plainfield, Massachusetts. He was graduated at Hamilton College in 1851 and by the law department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1856. He practiced law in Chicago for a few years. In 1860 he removed to Hartford, Connecticut, where he continued to reside for the rest of his life. Here he lived neighbor to Mark Twain and Mrs. Stowe. He held various editorial positions on the Evening Press and on the Courant, a morning paper in which he held an interest. Letters of travel, printed in the Courant, and a series of articles, afterward published under the title of My Summer in a Garden, brought him into prominence as a cheery, humorous writer. In 1884 he took charge of the Editor's Drawer, a department of Harper's Magazine. Warner's reputation as a man of letters rests on his success as an essayist. A list of his writings gives a score or two of titles. The most noted are perhaps Back-Log Studies, My Summer in a Garden, My Winter on the Nile, The Golden House, a novel, and The Relation of Literature to Life. He was editor-in-chief also of the American Men of Letters Series, and the Library of the World's Best Literature. The single essay by which he is best known to schoolboys is A-Hunting of the Deer.