JAMES

See also:

• THOMAS
• THOMAS (c. 1654-1720)
• THOMAS (d. 110o)
• THOMAS, ARTHUR GORING (1850-1892)
• THOMAS, CHARLES LOUIS AMBROISE (1811-1896)
• THOMAS, GEORGE (c. 1756-1802)
• THOMAS, GEORGE HENRY (1816-187o)
• THOMAS, ISAIAH (1749-1831)
• THOMAS, PIERRE (1634-1698)
• THOMAS, SIDNEY GILCHRIST (1850-1885)
• THOMAS, ST
• THOMAS, THEODORE (1835-1905)
• THOMAS, WILLIAM (d. 1554)

THOMAS

See also:

• JAMES THOMAS FIELDS (1817-1881)

FIELDS (1817-1881)  , American publisher and author, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the 31st of December 1817 . At the age of seventeen he went to Boston as clerk in a bookseller's shop . Afterwards he wrote for the newspapers, and in 1835 he read an anniversary poem entitled " Commerce " before the Boston Mercantile Library Association . In 1839 he became junior partner in the publishing and bookselling firm known after 1846 as Ticknor & Fields, and after 1868 as Fields, Osgood & Company . He was the publisher of the foremost contemporary American writers, with whom he was on terms of close personal friendship, and he was the American publisher of some of the best-known British writers of his time, some of whom, also, he knew intimately . The first collected edition of De Quincey's works (20 vols., 1850-1855) was published by his firm . As a publisher he was characterized by a somewhat rare combination of keen business acumen and sound, discriminating literary taste, and as a man he was known for his geniality and charm of manner . In 1862-1870, as the successor of James Russell Lowell, he edited the Atlantic Monthly . In 1871 Fields retired from business and from his editorial duties, and devoted himself to lecturing and to writing . Of his books the chief were the collection of sketches and essays entitled Under-brush (1877) and the chapters of reminiscence composing Yesterdays with Authors (1871), in which he recorded his personal friendship with Wordsworth, Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne and others . He died in Boston on the 24th of April 1881 . His second wife, ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS (b .

1834), whom he married in 1854, published Under the

Olive (1880), a book of verses; James T . Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches (1882); Authors and Friends (1896); The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897); and Orpheus (1900) .