Helen Hunt Jackson

Helen Maria Fiske was born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of a minister who taught Latin, Greek and philosophy at Amherst College. Both her parents died while she was a teenager. At school she was a classmate of Emily Dickinson, also from Amherst, and the two wrote to each other for the rest of their lives. In 1852 she married Captain Edward Bissell Hunt of the U.S. Army. Her husband and both of their sons died young, and much of her early poetry grew out of that grief. Ralph Waldo Emerson admired her poems and read them in public. In 1875 she married William Sharpless Jackson, a banker in Colorado Springs. After hearing the Ponca chief Standing Bear speak in Boston in 1879, she worked for fair treatment of Native Americans and wrote A Century of Dishonor (1881), a history of broken treaties that she sent to every member of Congress. Her novel Ramona (1884), about the Mission Indians of Southern California, became a bestseller. She died in San Francisco in 1885.

Helen Hunt Jackson is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented; her children were raised as Unitarians. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Emily Dickinson · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Willa Cather