STODDARD, CHARLES WARREN. - American writer, b. 7 Aug. 1843 in Rochester (New York), d. 23 Apr. 1909 in Monterey (California).

After having been a bookstore clerk, he began publishing verses that appeared under a pseudonym in the Golden Era, a literary newspaper of San Francisco. Having converted to Catholicism in 1867, he made three voyages between 1868 and 1873 to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, two to Hawaii and one to Tahiti, which provided him with the subjects for his South-Sea Idyls (1873), an enthusiastic description of the simplicity of life of those peoples, which earned him the name of "American Loti." In 1885 he published A Troubled Heart (Italian trans., Ricostruendo una fede perduta, Milan n.d.), an autobiography of his own conversion, and The Lepers of Molokai, in which he extolled the self-denial of Fr. Damien. Other works on the same subject of the South Seas are Hawaiian Life (1894) and The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904). A professor of English literature at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1885-86 and at the Catholic University of America in Washington from 1889 to 1902, he spent the last years of his life in California.

Bibliography2 works

BIBL.: T. Bentzon, Un Loti américain: C. W. S., in Revue des deux mondes, 138 (1896), pp. 615-44; C. G. Stroven, S., in Dict. of American Biogr., XVIII, New York 1936, p. 52, with bibl.

Silvio Furlani

@incollection{ec11_stoddard_charles_warren, author = {Furlani, Silvio}, title = {Stoddard, charles warren}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {XI}, pages = {1355}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1953}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/stoddard-charles-warren} }

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Stoddard, Charles Warren

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