Kennedy, John Pendleton

Kennedy, John Pendleton (Mark Littleton, Mephistopheles, pen names)

(1795–1870) politician, writer; born in Baltimore, Md. He graduated from Baltimore College (1812) and became a lawyer (1816). He devoted himself to both politics and writing; his most highly regarded novels include Swallow Barn (1832) and Rob of the Bowl (1838). He served in the House of Representatives (Whig, Md.; 1838–39, 1841–45). As secretary of the navy (1852–53), he organized several naval expeditions, notably that of Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Kennedy, John Pendleton

 

Born Oct. 25, 1795, in Baltimore; died Aug. 18, 1870, in Newport. American writer and public figure.

Kennedy was a supporter of the North in the Civil War of 1861–65. In the novel Swallow Barn (1832) he described the life of the Virginia planters in humorous terms. A romantic, he was influenced by W. Irving and J. F. Cooper, as evidenced in the historical novel Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835). In the novel Quodlibet (1840) he ridiculed American democracy from a conservative position.

WORKS

At Home and Abroad. [Philadelphia] 1872.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Parrington, V. L. Osnovnye techeniia amerikanskoi mysli, vol. 2. Moscow, 1962.
Bohner, C. H. J. P. Kennedy: Gentleman From Baltimore. Baltimore [1961]. (Contains bibliography, pp. 238–41.)

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.