Harold Frederic

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Harold Frederic (born Harold Henry Frederick; August 19, 1856 – October 19, 1898) was an American journalist and novelist.

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Life and career

Harold Frederick was born in Utica, New York, on August 19, 1856, to Presbyterian parents. He attended the Methodist Church but was generally skeptic about religion. Frederic took an early interest in photography and journalism. The boy was primarily raised by his mother after his father was killed in a railroad crash when Frederic was 18 months old. He stopped school at the age of fifteen and began working as a photographer straight away. He was a photographic touch-up artist in his hometown and Boston for four years. He began serving as a proofreader for The Utica Herald and later The Utica Daily Observer in 1875. Frederic later became a reporter. Frederic married Grace Green Williams in 1877, and the two children were born together. He was editor of the Albany Evening Journal, the New York state capital, by 1882. Frederic, the Journal's editor, was involved in politics and particularly favored Republican Grover Cleveland for Governor of New York over Republican Senator Charles J. Folger in 1882 New York state election; although Frederic's services cost him his career, the son of a Republican senator who bought the newspaper in 1884, his union opened doors for him when he arrived in England.

Frederic, the New York Times' London reporter, went to live in England in 1884 and spent the remainder of his life in London. Frederic wrote about the cholera epidemic in southern Europe, several wars and riots, as well as the Irish Home Rule Movement, which he endorsed. Frederic wrote his first important work of fiction, Seth's Wife (1887), which was positively reviewed and followed by others such as The Lawton Girl (1890), and Marsena (1895).

Although Frederic wrote many early stories, it wasn't until he published Illumination (1896), better known by its American name, The Damnation of Theron Ware, that followed Gloria Mundi (1898), that his potential as a novelist was fully realized. Damnation became Frederic's best-selling product and is the town's best-known work; critic Jonathan Yardley described it as a "minor masterpiece of realism" in its description. Frederic also wrote a collection of historical fiction on topics including the American Revolution and the American Civil War. He also wrote non-fiction, which included a report on antisemitism in Russia, The New Exodus (1892), for which he went to Russia to look at the persecution of the Jewish people there.

Frederic had three illegitimate children with his mistress Kate Lyon, as well as the five children he had with her in Surrey, where they lived happily together. Frederic died after suffering a stroke in August 1898, and Edmund Wilson writes, "The doctors told him to rest and to retrain himself to more temperate habits," but the doctor denied their warnings with scorn, insisting on smoking brandy and whiskey and riding. Kate Lyon was a Christian Scientist and was sent by a woman healer who, Frederic said, "bores my head off." Frederic, a sociologist who did not know Lyon's faith, dismissed both physicians and Lyon's healer, resulting in a public controversies when his ex wife Grace Frederic brought charges of murder against Lyon and her healer, who were later cleared in the trial. Right before he died, Frederic's wife sued him for divorce.

Frederic's remains were returned to the United States, where he was laid to rest in Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica, New York.

In 2013, Frederic's 1893 work The Copperhead, which was dealing with the American Civil War, was turned into a film.

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