Biography

Found in 18641214FAS_LMW1.
American poet, author of the poem "The Culprit Fay" (1819).
Joseph Rodman Drake was a Romantic poet who was a contributor to the beginning of U.S. national literature. After his father died, his mother remarried and moved to New Orleans, leaving him with New York relatives. In 1816 he graduated from medical school and, in 1819, began collaborating on the "Croaker Papers" with poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, whom he had met and become friends with at school. They published these satirical verses under pseudonyms in the New York Evening Post. They were later printed in book form in 1860. Drake married an heiress and opened a pharmacy in New York. He asked his wife to destroy his unpublished poems, but she kept them and one of his daughters published 19 of them in 1835 with the title "The Culprit Fay and Other Poems."