Drake inherited his father's taste for historical work, and was an eager collector long before he wrote anything for publication.

[1] Drake spent 20 years collecting material for his Dictionary of American Biography and wrote it by himself.

With his latest corrections and all the materials that he had gathered for a new edition—before his 1885 death in Washington D.C.—it was incorporated in Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography.

He edited Henry Schoolcraft's History of the Indians, and contributed articles on Brighton, Watertown, and Roxbury to the Justin Winsor's Memorial History of Boston (1880–82).

Full title of the Dictionary in its 1872 first edition:[2] Dictionary of American Biography, including Men of the Time; containing nearly ten thousand notices of persons of both sexes, of native and foreign birth, who have been remarkable, or prominently connected with the Arts, Sciences, Literature, Politics, or History, of the American Continent.