Elsie Venner

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES Elsie Venner Oliver Wendell Holmes, essayist, poet, scientist, and one of the most lovable men who have adorned the literature of the English tongue, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, Aug. 29, 1809, of a New England family with a record in which he took great pride. After studying medicine at Harvard, he went to Europe on a prolonged tour, and, returning, took his M.D., and became a popular professor of anatomy. He had some repute as a graceful poet in his student days. "Elsie Venner," at first called "The Professor's Story," was published in 1861, and was the first sustained work of fiction that came from the pen of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Illumined by admirable pictures of life and character in a typical New England town, the book itself is a remarkable study of heredity--a study only relieved by the author's kindly humour.