The Chambered Nautilus (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born on August 29, 1809, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a Congregationalist minister, and his mother was a member of what would become the Unitarian Church. After years of private schooling, Holmes attended Harvard College, where he began to translate and write poetry. He started to have his poetry published after college, while he was studying law. One of his most famous poems, "Old Ironsides," was published in 1830. A response to the news that the famous Revolutionary War ship USS Constitution was to be taken apart and used as scrap, the poem gained Holmes a wide audience and garnered the necessary public support to have the ship preserved.

Holmes quit studying law in 1831 in favor of a degree in medicine, and, in 1833, he traveled to France to continue his medical education. During his studies and upon his return to the United States, Holmes refused requests that he have more poetry published and dedicated himself to practicing medicine. In the late 1830s, however, Holmes became involved in a variety of pursuits that included lecturing and gathering in prominent conversation circles. In 1840, Holmes married Amelia Jackson. In 1841, their first child, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born. A variety of Holmes's important articles about medicine were published, and he continued lecturing until his position on issues such as the abolition of slavery, which he opposed, drew too much criticism. In 1857, installments of Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table were published in the first edition of the magazine Atlantic Monthly. Posing as the record of a lively discussion group, Autocrat mixed prose with poetry; it contained some of Holmes's best poems, including "The Chambered Nautilus,"; and was very well received. Holmes wrote further installments of the series under the title The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, which was published in book form in 1860.

A collection of Holmes's medical essays and his novel Elsie Venner were published in 1861, and both received mixed reviews. During the Civil War, Holmes wrote patriotic poetry and twice traveled to Philadelphia, because his son had been wounded in combat. Holmes's novel The Guardian Angel was published in 1867, and Holmes afterward focused on his medical research. His works on determinism and the brain were published in 1871 and 1875. After he retired from Harvard Medical School in 1882, Holmes concentrated on his literary work, editing his collected writings and writing a biography of the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, a novel dealing with women's rights, a travel narrative titled Our Hundred Days in Europe, and a prose work titled Over the Teacups. Holmes died of respiratory failure on October 7, 1894, in Boston.