Hamilton Wright Mabie

Hamilton Wright Mabie, A.M., L.H.D., LL.D. was an American essayist, editor, critic, and lecturer.  

  
He was born at Cold Spring, N. Y. in 1846. Mabie was the youngest child of Sarah Colwell Mabie who was from a wealthy Scottish-English family and Levi Jeremiah Mabie, whose ancestors were Scots-Dutch. They were early immigrants to New Amsterdam, New Netherland about 1647. Due to business opportunities with the opening of the Erie Canal his family moved to Buffalo, New York when he was approaching school age. At the young age of 16 he passed his college entrance examination, but waited a year before he attended Williams College (1867) and the Columbia Law School (1869).  

While at Williams, Mabie was a member of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and would serve as the first president of the North American Interfraternity Conference (Formally known as the National Interfraternity Conference).  

He received honorary degrees from his own alma mater, from Union College, and from Western Reserve and Washington and Lee universities. Although he passed his bar exams in 1869, he hated both the study and practice of law. In 1876 he married Jeanette Trivett. In the summer of 1879, he was hired to work at the weekly magazine, Christian Union (renamed The Outlook in 1893), an association that lasted until his death.  

In 1884, Mabie was promoted to associate editor of the Christian Union and then elected to the Author's Club, whose members included such men of established reputation as George Cary Eggleston, Richard Watson Gilder, Brander Matthews, and Edmund Clarence Stedman.  

In 1890, a small collection of Mabie's essays which reflected upon life, literature and nature were published as a volume entitled My Study Fire.