Frederick Wadsworth Loring

Frederick Wadsworth Loring (December 12, 1848 – November 5, 1871) was an American journalist, novelist and poet.

Loring was born on December 12, 1848, in Boston, Massachusetts, to David and Mary Hall Stodder Loring.^[1] He was a fifth great grandson to immigrant Thomas Loring.^[1] He graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1866, and then from Harvard University, where he first made his mark with contributions to the Harvard Advocate, in 1870. Inheriting a love of literature from his mother, who died when he was eleven, he quickly gained in stature as an up-and-coming American author.^[2] In 1871, he published a novel, Two College Friends, and a book of poems, The Boston Dip and Other Verses. Two College Friends, in which two Harvard students serve together in the Civil War, has been singled out as an important example of the representation of romantic male friendship.^[3] He also made numerous contributions, both fiction and non-fiction, to such periodicals as The Atlantic Monthly, Appleton's Journal, Old and New, The Independent, and Every Saturday during this time. That he was connected to Boston's literary circles is evidenced by the first preface to the 1872 collective novel, Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other: An Every Day Novel. The novel, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Adeline D.T. Whitney, Lucretia P. Hale, Frederic Beecher Perkins, Edward Everett Hale, and Loring, was finished and published after Loring's death with Loring's contributions finished by the other authors.