William Austin

Writer

  • Born: March 2, 1778
  • Birthplace: Lunenburg, Worcester County, Massachusetts
  • Died: June 27, 1841
  • Place of death: Charlestown, Massachusetts

Biography

William Austin was born March 2, 1778, in Lunenburg, Worcester County, Massachusetts. His father, Nathaniel Austin, was a pewter smith by trade, who created a modest amount of wealth through real estate. His mother, Margaret Rand, was the daughter of a deacon and bore six children, of which William was the third. The family had been displaced from their Charlestown, Massachusetts, home after the burning of Charlestown during the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Shortly after Austin’s birth, the family was able to return to Charlestown, where Austin would grow up in a politically divided home; Austin’s father was a Patriot and his mother was a Tory. These political differences would continue among Austin and his siblings, culminating in Austin running for General Court of Massachusetts on the Jeffersonian Republican ticket, against his brother Nathaniel, running as a Federalist.

On June 17, 1806, Austin married Charlotte Williams, who died December 10, 1820. Two years after her death, he married Lucy Jones on October 3, 1822. Between the two marriages, Austin fathered fourteen children.

Austin attended the Reverend John Shaw’s school and continued his education at Harvard. While at Harvard, Austin became a devotee of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy and wrote “Stricture on Harvard University,” which sited the restraints the school forced upon the student body. He refused membership in the fraternity Phi Beta Kappa because he opposed secret and selective societies. After graduating in 1798, Austin went on to study law at Lincoln’s Inn in London. He paid his way there by working as a schoolmaster and chaplain on a United States frigate.

While abroad, Austin published Letters from London, Written During the Years 1802 and 1803 (1804), which examined New England Republican attitudes toward English institutions and traditions. In 1803, Austin returned to Charlestown and quickly amassed clients for a large law practice. He took an active role in local government and civic affairs. He represented Charlestown in General Court for more than three decades and the County of Middlesex in the 1810’s and 1820’s. Austin served as a delegate in the 1820 convention, which revised Massachusetts’s constitution.

Austin began his writing career as a nonfiction writer and journalist, but he is best known for his story “Peter Rugg: The Missing Man” (1826), which was published in the New England Galaxy on September 10, 1824. The story takes place in 1820, with the story’s protagonist (a fifty-year-old phantom) driving his carriage home toward Boston with his daughter in the midst of a storm. Some fifty years earlier, the two unfortunates made the same journey against a threatening storm, at which point Peter Rugg had sworn he would reach his home that night or never see it again. The two have since become a common vision in the town on stormy nights. At the time, the story was imaginative and original, and it would become a fixture in early American literature.

William Austin died June 27, 1841. He is best known for writing incredibly imaginative, humorous, and moralistic tales, which are said to have heavily influenced American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.