Alice Cary (2) (1820–1871)

Alice Cary was born in Mount Healthy, near Cincinnati, Ohio. She was the older sister of Phoebe Cary, who also became a poet. They were raised on a farm called Clovernook, in a Universalist household. Both sisters began writing as teenagers, and had verses published in local newspapers. Alice's first major poem, "The Child of Sorrow," was published in 1838 and praised by other writers and critics such as Edgar Allan Poe, Horace Greeley, and Rufus Griswold, who included her work in his influential anthology The Female Poets of America. In 1849, the two sisters co-published a volume called Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, which made them well-known. They moved together to New York City, where they hosted a salon visited by prominent political, artistic and literary figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, P.T. Barnum, John Greenleaf Whittier, Robert Dale Owen, William Lloyd Garrison, and Mary E. Dodge. Alice contributed articles and poems to leading literary magazines such as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Putnam's, the New York Ledger, and the Independent. She wrote several volumes of memoirs including Clovernook: or, Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West (1852) and Clovernook Children (1854), plus novels and short stories for adults and children. She was an invalid for many years and died in 1871 at age 51 of tuberculosis.