Holmes considered himself first a physician and then an educator. But Oliver Wendell Holmes is really known for the humorous and thoughtful journalistic writings that began in the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly in 1857. The all-star contributors included his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing from Andover as a Phillips Academy faculty wife. His column was called "The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table", and his editor said the readers all turned to his piece first. At the end of the first year's issues, "The Autocrat" was published in one volume and became an instant best-seller across the nation. |
He invented the first hand-held stereoscope, when photography was a new fad in the U.S. His primitive model, with a recycled awl handle, is in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, part of Special Collections. |
