Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854) By

Timothy Shay Arthur (June 6, 1809 - March 6, 1885) - known as T.S. Arthur - was a popular 19th-century American author. He is most famous for his temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854), which helped demonize alcohol in the eyes of the American public. He was also the author of dozens of stories for Godey's Lady's Book, the most popular American monthly magazine in the antebellum era, and he published and edited his own Arthur's Home Magazine, a periodical in the Godey's model, for many years. Virtually forgotten now, Arthur did much to articulate and disseminate the values, beliefs, and habits that defined respectable, decorous middle-class life in antebellum America. Born just outside Newburgh, New York, Arthur lived as a child in nearby Fort Montgomery, New York By 1820, Arthur's father, a miller, had relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, where Arthur briefly attended local schools. At age fourteen, Arthur apprenticed to a tailor, but poor eyesight and a general lack of aptitude for physical labor led him to seek other work. He then found employment with a wholesale merchandiser and later as an agent for an investment concern, a job that took him briefly to Louisville, Kentucky. Otherwise, he lived as a young adult in Baltimore. Smitten by literature, Arthur devoted as much time as he could to reading and fledgling attempts to write. By 1830, he had begun to appear in local literary magazines. That year he contributed poems under his own name and pseudonyms to a gift book called The Amethyst. Also during this time he participated in an informal literary coterie called the Seven Stars (the name drawn from that of the tavern in which they met), whose members also included Edgar Allan Poe