George Parsons Lathrop

George Parsons Lathrop (1851–1898) was an American author, poet, and critic who lived and worked during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Born in Hawaii and educated in the United States and Germany, he became a notable figure in American literary circles, perhaps best known for his close association with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family — he married Hawthorne’s daughter, Rose, and wrote a biographical study of the elder author. Lathrop was also a founding member of the American Copyright League, working alongside prominent writers of his era to advance protections for literary works.

Beyond his critical and biographical writing, Lathrop produced poetry, fiction, and journalism throughout his career. His verse is marked by a distinctly atmospheric quality, drawing on imagery from nature and the supernatural to evoke mood and feeling. In Incantation, for instance, he conjures a late-autumn scene — leaves thinning by the thousands, a hollow-cheeked moon staring down from a dim, reechoing night — to create a sense of mysterious, almost ritual intensity. The poem reflects a wider tendency in his work toward the Gothic and the evocative, using natural imagery as a vehicle for exploring interior emotional states.

Lathrop contributed regularly to periodicals and literary journals of the Gilded Age, and his work appeared alongside that of the most respected American writers of his time. He also collaborated with composer Walter Damrosch on an opera libretto based on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, demonstrating the breadth of his creative ambitions beyond the page. His critical writings helped shape how late-nineteenth-century readers understood the legacy of American Romanticism, particularly the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Though his own creative output has received less sustained attention than that of some contemporaries, Lathrop remains a representative figure of the ambitious, culturally engaged American man of letters in the post-Civil War decades.