Jacob Abbott

Jacob Abbott (1803-1879) was an American author, educator, and Congregational minister, born in Hallowell, Maine, and trained at Bowdoin College and Andover Theological Seminary. He founded the Mount Vernon School for girls in Boston in 1829 and became one of the most prolific juvenile writers of his century, credited with 180 books of his own and dozens more as coauthor or editor, best known for the Rollo series. With his brother John S. C. Abbott he supplied the illustrated historical biographies that Harper & Brothers reissued in 1900 as the Makers of History series, long a fixture of American school and public libraries.