Realistic

Abraham Lincoln was born 12 February 1809 near Hodgenville, Kentucky, and grew up with little formal schooling. Self-educated, he was eventually elected to the Illinois House of Representatives and served from 1834 to 1842. Admitted to the bar in 1836, Lincoln used law as a gateway into politics, which dominated his life.

Margaret E. Sangster was born Margaret Munson on February 22, 1838, in New Rochelle, New York, and attended schools in Paterson, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York. She gave up an early career in writing when she married George Sangster in 1858. At his death in 1871, she returned to writing, becoming associate editor of Hearth and Home.

John Boyle O'Reilly, the greatest Irishman in America at the time of his death, was born at Douth Castle, Drogheda, Ireland, on June 28, 1844. After an education at the National School, and an early career in journalism, he enlisted in the Hussars and became a Fenian.

William Vaughn Moody was born on July 8, 1869, in Spenser, Indiana, and his family moved in 1871 to New Albany. He obtained his B.A. (1893) and M.A. (1894) at Harvard University, where he became co-editor of the Harvard Monthly, and joined its English Department in the 1894-95 academic year as assistant to Louis E. Gates.

Born July 22, 1849, in New York city to Moses and Esther Nathan Lazarus, assimilated, Sephardic Jews, Emma Lazarus grew up in New York city and Newport, Rhode Island. In 1866 she published her first book, Poems and Translations, after which Emerson acted as her informal mentor.

Pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the American journalist, novelist and humorist born and raised in Missouri, Mark Twain is best known for his novels, The Prince and the Pauper (1882), A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Robert Lowry, born March 12, 1826, graduated in 1854 from the University of Lewisburg (Bucknell University) and became a baptist minister in West Chester, Pennsylvania, New York City, and Brooklyn before rejoining Lewisburg in 1869 as a faculty member and then its chancellor.

According to Glenn Blalock, Ben King was born on March 17, 1857 in St. Joseph, Michigan, married Aseneth Belle Latham, of St. Joseph, on November 27, 1883, in Chicago, and had two sons by her. King belonged to the Chicago Press Club and to the Whitechapel Club, which attracted authors and journalists.

Helen Fiske, born in Amherst, Mass., took her two last names from her husbands. She married Edward Bissell Hunt first, was widowed young, in 1865, and shortly afterwards had lost both sons from that marriage as well. Ten years later, she married a quaker, William Sharpless Jackson and lived in Colorado Springs with him.

Eugene Field was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1850, educated in Monson and Williamstown, Mass., at Knox College (Galesburg, Illinois), and at the University of Missouri. His career in journalism saw him write for newspapers in St.