John S. C. Abbott

John Stevens Cabot Abbott (1805-1877) was born in Brunswick, Maine, graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825, and trained for the ministry at Andover Theological Seminary, preaching in Worcester, Roxbury, and Nantucket before leaving the Congregational pulpit in 1844. The success of his advice book The Mother at Home had already made him a working author, and he went on to become one of the most widely read popular historians of his day, best known for the admiring two-volume History of Napoleon Bonaparte (1855). His American Pioneers and Patriots series brought accessible biographies of Boone, Kit Carson, Miles Standish, and a dozen others to a general audience. His older brother Jacob Abbott, his collaborator on several biography series, wrote the once-ubiquitous Rollo books for children.