STODDARD, CHARLES WARREN

After working as a bookseller, he began publishing verses under a pseudonym in the Golden Era, a literary newspaper of San Francisco. Converted to Catholicism in 1867, he made three voyages to the islands of the Pacific Ocean from 1868 to 1873—two to Hawaii and one to Tahiti—which provided the subjects for his South-Sea Idyls (1873), an enthusiastic description of the simple life of those peoples, earning him the name of the "American Loti." In 1885 he published A Troubled Heart (II. trans., Ricostruendo una fede perduta, Milan n.d.), an autobiography of his conversion, and The Lepers of Molokai, in which he extolled the selflessness of Fr. Damien. Other works on the same theme of the South Seas include Hawaii in Life (1894) and The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904). He served as professor of English literature at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana from 1885 to 1886 and at the Catholic University of America in Washington from 1889 to 1902, spending the final years of his life in California.