Biography Arabella Eugenia Smith

Poet Biography

Arabella Eugenia Smith was born in 1844 in Lichfield, Ohio, and resided from 1850 to 1874 in Percival, Iowa. She graduated from Tabor College in Tabor, Iowa.
After graduation, she became an instructor there. She published If I Should Die To-night in The Christian Union on June 18, 1873, and in only a few years it swept America as one of the county's favorite poems and hymns. Her authorship of the poem was quickly obscured though; It was presented under anonymous in Slason Thompson's, The Humbler Poets: A Collection of Newspaper and Periodical Verse 1870 to 1885.
Very little is known about Smith, She died in July, 1916, in Santa Barbara, California,
Her biography appears in A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson.