Joel Barlow

Joel Barlow (1754–1812) was born in Redding, Connecticut, and served briefly as a chaplain in the Continental Army before turning to poetry and, later, diplomacy. One of the "Connecticut Wits," he first made his name with the epic Vision of Columbus (1787), expanded decades later as The Columbiad (1807), and with the mock-heroic Hasty Pudding (1793), written in France in homesick tribute to New England cornmeal mush. He spent much of the 1790s in Europe on business and radical politics, negotiated the release of American captives as consul in Algiers, and translated the concluding chapters of Volney's Ruins into English at the author's own request. Appointed American minister to France in 1811, he died the following winter in a village in present-day Poland while travelling to meet Napoleon during the retreat from Russia.