James Gates Percival (September 15, 1795 – May 2, 1856) was an American poet, surgeon, and geologist, born in Berlin, Connecticut, and died in Hazel Green, Wisconsin.

[1][2][3] James Gates Percival was a precocious child and a versatile, yet morbid and impractical man.

His sentimentalism and dazzling diction appealed to a wide audience, earning him a reputation as the foremost poet in the United States during the 1820s.

[4] In 1824, he briefly served as a professor of chemistry at West Point before resigning and dedicating several years to assisting Noah Webster in editing his American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828.

In 1835, the governor of Connecticut commissioned Percival to prepare a geological survey of the state, which he completed and published in 1842.