Hagedorn, Hermann, 1882-1964

Hermann Hagedorn was born in New York City in 1882 and educated at Harvard University, the University of Berlin, and Columbia University. From 1909 to 1911 he was an instructor in English at Harvard. Hagedorn was a friend and biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and served as Secretary and Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association from 1919 to 1957. Hagedorn died in Santa Barbara, California in 1964.

Hagedorn was an American author, poet and biographer. In addition to his biography on Robinson, he wrote on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, who was a personal friend.

Hermann Hagedorn was a German-American author. He defied his immigrant father to pursue his dream of being a writer, and published poems, plays, and novels. After meeting former President Theodore Roosevelt, Hagedorn shifted his focus to biography, and produced several biographies of Roosevelt as well as other contemporary figures.

Poet and biographer.

Hermann Hagedorn (1882-1964), poet and biographer.

Biographical Note

Hermann Hagedorn, biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, poet, and novelist, was born in New York on 18 July 1882, the son of Hermann and Anna (Schwedler) Hagedorn. He prepared at the Hill School and took his bachelor's degree in 1907 at Harvard College. He married Dorothy Oakley in 1908. After traveling in Europe and studying at the University of Berlin and Columbia, he returned to Harvard in the spring of 1909 as an instructor in English and an assistant in comparative literature to Barrett Wendell. He taught there for two years. Novels, plays, and volumes of verse followed. He wrote lyrics for the Peterborough pageant and was affiliated with the artists' colony in Peterborough, N.H., as a director of the Edward MacDowell Association. With Porter Emerson Browne, Julian Street, and Charles Hanson Towne he founded the Vigilantes, an organization of American writers founded in 1916 to support American citizenship and preparedness for the war.

During the pre-convention campaign of 1916 he met Theodore Roosevelt, whose personality captivated him; the resulting friendship shaped the course of his career. The former president cooperated with him in the writing of The Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt, published in 1918. After Roosevelt's death the following year, Hermann Hagedorn became assistant secretary and later executive secretary of the Roosevelt Memorial Association, an affiliation he maintained for the rest of his life. From the association's offices in the Roosevelt birthplace site in New York City, he researched other books on the former president: Roosevelt in the Badlands, Roosevelt, Prophet of Unity, The Bugle that Woke America, and The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill . He also edited several selections of the president's writings, including the twenty-volume Works of Theodore Roosevelt . Leonard Wood, the military surgeon who was a Roosevelt confidant, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, the poet whose popularity Roosevelt encouraged, were subjects of his biographies. He was the director of the Theodore Roosevelt Centennial Commission from 1955 to 1959.

Other subjects of his biographical pen were William Boyce Thompson, the mining operator, Robert S. Brookings, merchant, philanthropist, and founder of the Brookings Institution, and Albert Schweitzer. A collection of biographical sketches, Americans: A Book of Lives, was published in 1946. His books for children, widely used in schools, include Book of Courage and We, the People . Two later works in verse are Combat at Midnight (1940) and The Bomb that Fell on America (1946); letters regarding the publication and public reception of the latter title make up a part of the correspondence in these papers. In The Hyphenated Family; An American Saga, he tells the story of his German-American family. During much of his adult life he lived in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he died on 27 July 1964.