Let’s brag on those we love. I’ll start. My 88 year old father just self published his 6th biographic work, this one about a celebrated preacher whose oratory skills were the talk of a part of nineteenth century America. This book includes writings about Edward Taylor by Emerson, Whitman and many others. My father researched this for a number of years and spent a large part of the last six months scrupulously editing the book (he has had this published by amazon, so did not have a publisher’s editor for the first time in his writing history).
Amazon blurb: One of the most celebrated nineteenth-century American preachers was Edward T. Taylor, always known as Father Taylor. Taylor was an uneducated former sailor who became a Methodist minister and served a church for sailors in Boston’s North End for forty years. Despite his lack of education, his natural talents attracted not only large crowds of sailors but also people such as Walt Whitman, who said Taylor was “the one essentially perfect orator” he had ever heard. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “the Poet of the church” and “the Shakspear of the sailor and the poor.” Horace Mann said that in Taylor’s preaching “soul speaks to soul.” The book contains a biographical essay on Taylor by the author, scores of accounts of his life and preaching written by people who knew him, and nineteen illustrations.