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James Parton (February 9, 1822 – October 17, 1891) was an English-born American biographer who wrote books on the lives of Horace Greeley, Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, and contributed three biographies to Eminent Women of the Age. (see "Selected Works," below).
Parton was the most popular biographer of his day in America. Parton's nonfiction combined elements of novel writing, which made his books quite popular. Harriet Beecher Stowe once thanked him "for the pleasure you have given me in biographical works which you have had the faculty of making more interesting than romance—(let me trust it is not by making them in part works of imagination)."Casper, Scott E. Constructing America Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999: 252.
His first wife, Sara (1811–1872), sister of Nathaniel Parker Willis, and widow of Charles H. Eldredge (d. 1846), attained considerable popularity as a writer under the pen name Fanny Fern. They were married in 1856. Her works include the novels, Ruth Hall (1854), reminiscent of her own life, and Rose Clark (1857); and several volumes of sketches and stories.
In 1876 Parton married Ellen Willis Eldredge, his first wife's daughter by her first husband, Charles Eldredge. With Ellen (and previously Fanny Fern), he raised Ethel, the daughter of Grace Eldredge (Fanny Fern's daughter) and writer Mortimer Thomson (also known as Philander Doesticks). Although never legally adopted by Parton, she took his last name upon reaching her majority. Ethel Parton became a famous writer of children's books about 19th-century life in Newburyport, MA, published in the 1930s and 1940s.
James and Ellen had two children, Hugo and Mabel. Hugo's children, who constitute James Parton's legal and genetic grandchildren, were
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