Biography Gamaliel Bradford

Poet Biography

Gamaliel Bradford (9 October 1863 - 11 April 1932) was an American biographer, critic, poet, and dramatist. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the sixth of seven men called Gamaliel Bradford in unbroken succession, of whom the first, Gamaliel Bradford, was a great-grandson of Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony.

Bradford attended Harvard University briefly with the class of 1886, then continued his education with a private tutor, but is said to have been educated "mainly by ill-health and a vagrant imagination. As an adult, Bradford lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The building and student newspaper for the Wellesley High School (where Sylvia Plath received her secondary school education are named after Gamaliel Bradford.

In his day Bradford was regarded as the "Dean of American Biographers. He is acknowledged as the American pioneer of the psychographic form of written biographies, after the style developed by Lytton Strachey. Despite suffering poor health during most of his life, Bradford wrote 114 biographies over a period of 20 years.