Nathan Haskell Dole

Nathan Haskell Dole (August 31, 1852 – May 9, 1935) was an American editor, translator, and author. A writer and journalist in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, he translated many of the works of Leo Tolstoy and books of other Russians; novels of the Spaniard Armando Palacio Valdés (1886–90); a variety of works from the French and Italian.

Biography

Nathan Haskell Dole was born August 31, 1852, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He was the second son of the Reverend Nathan Dole (1811–1855) and mother Caroline (Fletcher) Dole, his older brother being Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927). After their father died of tuberculosis, their mother moved with the two boys to live with their grandmother in the Fletcher homestead, a strict Puritan home, in Norridgewock, Maine, where Dole grew up.

Sophie May wrote her Prudy Books in Norridgewock, and they may be an indication of the sort of life Nathan Dole and his brother lived there. A newspaper article about Nathan in the Boston Evening Transcript, February 8, 1929, suggested that Nathan, lively from the start, may have offered good material for the mischievous boys who acted as foil for the goody-good ones in the Prudy Books. The same Boston Evening Transcript article said that Nathan was an omnivorous reader, who soon taught himself to read in French, German, Greek and Latin. He studied at the Eaton School in Norridgewock, and then under private tutors. Later he went to the Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy, graduating in 1870, and then to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1874. Years later he received an L.H. Doctorate and from Oglethorp University in Atlanta, Georgia, which made him an Honorary Alumnus.