Josiah Gilbert Holland (July 24, 1819 – October 12, 1881) was an American novelist, essayist, poet and spiritual mentor to the country in the years following the Civil War.
Born in Western Massachusetts, he was "the most successful man of letters in the United States" in the latter half of the nineteenth century and sold more books in his lifetime than Mark Twain did in his.
Known by his initials "J.G.", Holland penned the first biography of Abraham Lincoln, just months after his assassination, which was a bestseller, and he published the first known poem written by an African American. One of Holland's novels was among the earliest examples of the genre that became literary realism and he published a few poems of Emily Dickinson's in The Republican, the newspaper he edited. Holland and his wife, Elizabeth Luna Chapin, were close friends with her.
Holland became a popular Lyceum lecturer and wrote advice essays under the pseudonym Timothy Titcomb. He composed lyrics to hymns, such as the beloved Methodist Christmas tune "There's a Song in the Air", which was published worldwide including translations into Tagalog and Belarusian. He helped establish, and was editor of, the middle-class flagship magazine Scribner's Monthly.
Though Holland was a contemporary of the canonical and more renowned poet and novelist Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, respectively, neither men "ever tasted the sweets of success as Holland did, perhaps, because neither wrote what the nation’s readers cared so much about". His writings are quoted by politicians and pastors alike though few today recognize Holland's name.
