William Davis Ticknor was born on August 6, 1810, on the outskirts of Lebanon, New Hampshire, the oldest boy of nine brothers and sisters.

[citation needed] As a boy, Ticknor worked on the family farm during the summers and attended the district school during the winters.

Their three sons Howard Malcom, Benjamin Holt and Thomas Baldwin Ticknor all graduated from Harvard and entered into their father's firm.

During the Civil War, Benjamin Holt Ticknor enlisted in the Forty-Fifth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers and was commissioned as second lieutenant of Company G until May 1863.

With the widely varying but well matched talents of the two partners, Ticknor and Fields grew to become one of the leading publishing houses in the 19th century.

Ticknor was the first American publisher to pay foreign authors for the rights to their works, beginning with a check to Alfred Tennyson in 1842.

From the Old Corner Book Store, Ticknor and Fields published the works of Horatio Alger, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and John Greenleaf Whittier.

"[4] In Philadelphia, the duo visited Fairmount Park and Ticknor offered Hawthorne his jacket for warmth before they returned to the Continental Hotel.