Bates, Arlo (1850 - 1918)

Genre: Drama/Theatre/Film, General Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry

Arlo Bates, a poet, novelist, and English professor, was born in East Machias, Maine, on 16 Dec. 1850 and graduated from Bowdoin College in 1876, receiving a Master's degree in 1879. He edited the Boston Sunday Courier from 1880-1893, then became an English professor at M.I.T. (from 1893-1915), all the while writing poems, lyrics, stories, plays, articles, and novels. Bates was married to Harriet Lenora Vose (1856-1886), a writer whose pseudonym was Eleanor Putnum; Bates and Vose collaborated on a novel, Prince Vance, finished the year she died, 1886. Bates himself died on 24 Aug. 1918.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

  • Sonnets in Shadow (1887)
  • The Poet and His Self (1891)

Drama

  • Love in a Cloud: A Comedy in Filigree (1900)
  • A Mothers' Meeting (1909)

Novels and Stories

  • Patty's Perversities (1881)
  • A Wheel of Fire (1885)
  • Berries of the Brier (1886)
  • A Lad's Love (1887)
  • Prince Vince: the story of a prince with a court in his box (1888), with his wife, Harriet Vose
  • The Pagans (1888/1970)
  • The Philistines (1889/1970)
  • In the Bundle of Time (1893/1970)
  • The Puritans (1898/1968)
  • The Intoxicated Ghost, and other stories (1908/1972)

Non-Fiction, Articles, etc.

  • edited Old Salem (1886), written by Eleanor Putnam, pseudonym for Harriet Vose, his wife
  • Talks on Writing English (1896)
  • Talks on the Study of Literature (1897/1925)
  • Talks on Teaching Literature (1906)

Selected Resources