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. In 1875, she edited "Christian at Work" and then the "Christian Intelligencer," in 1882 "Harper's Young People," and from 1889 to 1899 "Harper's Bazaar." She was a prolific writer of fiction and verse, famous for such poems as "Are the Children at Home?" A member of the Dutch Reformed Church, she died blind on June 4, 1912, in South Orange, New Jersey. She described her life in An Autobiography: From My Youth Up; Personal Reminiscences (1909).
-
American Authors 1600-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature. Ed. Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1938. 669-70.
-
The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. VI. New York: James T. White, 1896. 169.
-
Sangster, Margaret E. Poems of the Household. 1882.
-
--. On the Road Home: Poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893.
-
--. Lyrics of Love of Hearth & Home and Field and Garden. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901.
-
--. Cross Roads. New York: Frank Lovell, Bible House, 1919.