Josiah Gilbert Holland (July 24, 1819 – October 12, 1881) was an American novelist, essayist, poet and spiritual mentor to the Nation in the years following the Civil War.

[1] Born in Western Massachusetts, he was “the most successful man of letters in the United States” in the latter half of the nineteenth century and sold more books in his lifetime than Mark Twain did in his.

Holland became a popular Lyceum lecturer and wrote advice essays under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb as well as lyrics to hymns, including the beloved Methodist Christmas tune "There's a Song in the Air.” He helped establish and was editor of the middle-class flagship magazine Scribner's Monthly.

Born along the Hop Brook near the intersection of Federal Street and Orchard Road, in the village of Dwight, in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on July 24, 1819, Holland grew up in a poor family struggling to make ends meet.

He spent only a few years at the low-slung family farmhouse at Dwight and later quipped that he’d like to “burn it to the ground.”[5] The youngest of six children, his parents were deeply religious and evangelical, from pious Puritan stock.

[7] In early 1847, Holland begin publishing a newspaper, The Bay State Weekly Courier, but the attempt proved unsuccessful, as did his medical practice.

[10] He left New England that spring for the South, and took a teaching position in Richmond, Virginia, followed by one in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was named superintendent and implemented the ideas of fellow Massachusetts educator and reformer Horace Mann.

He wrote local news and essays, many of which were collected and published in book form, helping establish his literary reputation.

He followed in 1857 with an historical novel, The Bay-Path: A Tale of Colonial New England Life, and a collection of essays titled Titcomb's Letters to Young People, Single and Married in 1858.

In 1857, he began touring on the Lyceum lecture circuit, soon mentioned with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bayard Taylor and George William Curtis.

[13][14] When Sam Bowles took an extended trip to Europe, Holland temporarily assumed the duties as editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican.

During the 1870s he published three novels: Arthur Bonnicastle (1873), Sevenoaks (1875), and Nicholas Minturn (1877), which first were serialized in Scribners (afterwards it became The Century Magazine).

In 1877, Holland erected a summer house on one of the Thousand Islands in upstate New York, in Alexandria Bay, where one of its streets is named for him.

[15][16] The evening prior, he “remained late at the office to finish an editorial tribute to the martyred President James A. Garfield,” who had been assassinated a few weeks before.

[17] Most small town newspapers and major metropolitan dailies published memorial tributes to Holland, including journals that had often spoken scornfully of his “literary mediocrity, his triteness, and his intellectual parochialism.” John Greenleaf Whittier, the American Quaker poet and abolitionist, consistently praised Holland throughout his life and upon his death.

Although Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 23 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry are rarely read today, during the late nineteenth century they were enormously popular and by 1894 more than 750,000 volumes were sold.

He is considered one of the fireside poets such as contemporaries William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell and his work appeared in anthologies, featuring domestic themes, messages of morality and focused on a historical romantic past.

Fans obtained wood from maple trees standing in the yard of his birthplace at Dwight, Mass., to fashion into memorabilia such as penholders.

The doorstone of his birthplace, which burned to the ground in 1876, was recovered in 1932 and placed at the Stone House Museum, which also displays first editions of his works.

Dickinson sent more than ninety letters to the Hollands between 1853 and 1886 in which she shares “the details of life that one would impart to a close family member: the status of the garden, the health and activities of members of the household, references to recently-read books.”[30] Emily was a poet “influenced by transcendentalism and dark romanticism,” and her work bridged “the gap to Realism.”[31] Of the ten poems published in Dickinson's lifetime, the Springfield Daily Republican, with Sam Bowles and Josiah Holland as editors, published five, all unsigned, between 1852 and 1866.

[34] Later, as editor of Scribner’s Monthly beginning in 1870, Holland told Dickinson’s childhood friend Emily Fowler Ford that he had “some poems of [Dickinson’s] under consideration for publication [in Scribner’s Monthly]—but they really are not suitable—they are too ethereal.”[35] Josiah Gilbert Holland published the oldest known work of literature written by an African American in North America.

His provincial ethical standards; his subconscious Pharisaism; his incorrigible moralizing; his stubborn opposition to woman suffrage; his failure to distinguish between social drinking and debauchery, between light wine and strong whisky, between beer and rum, between the intelligent frankness of Walt Whitman and the vulgar pornography of The Black Crook—all these remained almost as irritatingly obtrusive at the end of his career as at the beginning.

The earliest tracing in the Oxford English Dictionary finds that “jasm” first appears in Holland’s 1860 novel, Miss Gilbert's Career: “‘She's just like her mother... Oh!

Instead, in such essays as "The Reconstruction of National Morality," published in April 1876, and "Falling from High Places," published in April 1878, he offered acute analyses of why, in the post-war years, so many Americans, including prominent Christian leaders, had succumbed to the temptation of attempting to obtain great riches dishonestly.

Such was the sanctity of Holland's own life that he seemed to offer a living, earthly warrant for the promise of eternity that he pictured in his writings.

Holland’s narrative poem “Bitter-Sweet” would become one of his most popular, and was described in 1894, by biographer Harriette Merrick Plunkett, as, Dr. Holland’s reflections on the mysteries of Life and Death, on the soul-wracking problems of Doubt and Faith, on the existence of Evil as one of the vital conditions of the universe, on the questions of Predestination, Original Sin, Free-will, and the whole haunting brood of Calvinistic theological metaphysics.

Today, a Holland sentence or paragraph is still quoted by politicians, artists and spiritual leaders alike, including Martin Luther King, Jr.,[49] though few recognize his name.

In the 2018 film Wild Nights with Emily, Josiah and Elizabeth Holland are portrayed by actor Michael Churven and actress Guinevere Turner, respectively.

The Nation Weeping for Its Dead: Observances at Springfield, Massachusetts, on President Lincoln's Funeral Day, Wednesday, April 19, 1865, Including Dr. Holland's Eulogy.

Morgan, Robert J.. Then Sings My Soul Special Edition: 150 Christmas, Easter, and All-Time Favorite Hymn Stories.