Francis Saltus Saltus

[4] Saltus was the leader of a group of bohemians in New York, including his brother Edgar and the young James Huneker, which met at Billy Moulds' bar in Manhattan's University Place; they were fond of absinthe and had "a taste for anything exotic".

[5] Van Wyck Brooks remarked that the unhappy Saltus "looked like a Greek god gone to ruin, partly as a result of the absinthe that he drank to excess".

[6] His verse reflects a refined, erotic and decadent temperament similar to that of his brother, inspired primarily by Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier (of whom he was a student)[7] and Charles Baudelaire.

Saltus wrote and edited a comic paper entitled the Thistle in the 1870s, the entire contents of which were written by him and signed with various pseudonyms.

[9] After an illness lasting several weeks, he died at midnight on June 24, 1889 at the Riverside Sanitarium in Tarrytown, aged thirty-nine[10] and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.