STODDARD, CHARLES WARREN. - American writer, b. 7 Aug. 1843 at Rochester (New York), d. 23 Apr. 1909 at Monterey (California).
After working as a bookseller’s clerk, he began publishing verses under a pseudonym in the Golden Era, a literary newspaper of S. Francisco. Having converted to Catholicism in 1867, between 1868 and 1873 he made three journeys to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, two to Hawaii and one to Tahiti, which supplied him with the subjects for his South-Sea Idyls (1873), an enthusiastic description of the simplicity of life among those peoples, which earned him the name of the “American Loti.” In 1885 he published A Troubled Heart (Italian trans., Ricostruendo una fede perduta, Milan n.d.), an autobiography of his conversion, and The Lepers of Molokai, in which he extolled the self-sacrifice of Fr. Damien. Other works on the same subject of the South Seas are Hawaiian Life (1894) and The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904). Professor of English literature at the University of Notre Dame, 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.