A short life of the author
Edward Everett Hale is remembered today for a single short story — “The Man Without a Country” (1863) — but that story was one of the most influential and most widely read works of American fiction in the nineteenth century, a patriotic parable that shaped how Americans understood their relationship to their nation for generations. Published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly during the darkest year of the Civil War, the story was so convincing in its fictional detail that many readers believed Philip Nolan — the officer who curses his country and is sentenced to live the rest of his life in exile on Navy ships, never hearing the name “United States” spoken again — was a real person. The story’s emotional power lay in its dramatisation of what patriotism actually meant: not a political abstraction but a felt connection to a place, a people, and a history that could only be fully understood when it was lost.
The New England Brahmin
Hale was born in Boston in 1822 into the intellectual aristocracy of New England. His father was the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser; his aunt was the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe; his namesake, Edward Everett, was the most celebrated orator of the antebellum period. He attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, graduating in 1839, and was ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1846. He served as pastor of the South Congregational Church in Boston for over forty years and was appointed Chaplain of the United States Senate in 1903.
Hale embodied the New England tradition of the clergyman-intellectual — a man of letters who combined pastoral duties with prolific writing, social reform, and civic engagement. He was involved in virtually every reform movement of the period: abolition, education, urban improvement, and the “Lend a Hand” movement, an organisation dedicated to community service that he founded.
The Man Without a Country
“The Man Without a Country” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1863, at a moment when Union morale was low and Copperhead sentiment — opposition to the war and sympathy for the Confederacy — was strong in parts of the North. Hale wrote the story as a deliberate act of propaganda, designed to inspire loyalty to the Union by dramatising the consequences of disloyalty.
The story follows Philip Nolan, a young army officer who, at his court-martial for participation in Aaron Burr’s conspiracy, cries out “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The court takes him at his word: he is sentenced to spend the rest of his life on Navy ships, transferred from vessel to vessel, never permitted to hear the name of his country or to learn anything about its affairs. Over the decades of his exile, Nolan comes to understand what he has lost, and his deathbed scene — in which he displays a makeshift shrine to the nation he can never return to — was one of the most emotionally powerful passages in nineteenth-century American literature.
The Brick Moon
Hale’s other significant contribution to literature was “The Brick Moon” (1869–1870), a novella published in the Atlantic Monthly that described the construction and accidental launch of an artificial satellite — a brick sphere orbited around the Earth. The story is considered the first work of fiction to describe a man-made satellite in orbit and is a landmark of early science fiction, predating the work of Verne and Wells.
Other Works
Hale was extraordinarily prolific — he published over sixty books, including historical works (The Life of Christopher Columbus, Franklin in France), reform tracts (How to Do It, Ten Times One Is Ten), novels (In His Name), and a charming memoir of his Boston childhood (A New England Boyhood, 1893). None achieved the fame of “The Man Without a Country,” but several remain readable for their portrait of nineteenth-century New England intellectual life.
Collecting Hale
“The Man Without a Country” appeared first in the Atlantic Monthly (December 1863) and was published in book form by Ticknor and Fields in 1865. The first separate edition is the primary collecting target. The Brick Moon and Other Stories (Little, Brown, 1899) is collected as an early science fiction landmark. A New England Boyhood (Cassell, 1893) is sought as memoir. Hale was active for so many decades that signed material is available, though early association copies with Civil War figures are particularly valued.