Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Writer, doctor, and educator Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, earned a BA at Harvard University in 1829 and an MD from Harvard Medical School in 1836. He was part of a group of New England-based writers called the Fireside Poets, which included William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. He also developed a friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Holmes was a brilliant and innovative doctor who was well known for his witty lectures at Harvard. He taught anatomy at Dartmouth College, and he served as dean of the Harvard Medical School.

Holmes’s nationally acclaimed prose series “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in its inaugural issue in 1857. A year later it was published as a book, which also included some of his most memorable poetry. Holmes’s other books include Over the Teacups (1891), The Poet of the Breakfast-Table (1872), The Professor of the Breakfast-Table (1860), and the novels A Mortal Antipathy (1885), The Guardian Angel (1867), and Elsie Venner (1861). 

He wrote poetry and prose actively until his death on October 7, 1894 in Cambridge.