Richard Malcolm Johnston, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetRichard Malcolm Johnston
Educator, writer
Date of Birth: 08-Mar-1822
Place of Birth: Hancock County, Georgia, United States
Date of Death: 23-Sep-1898
Profession: educator
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Pisces 
About Richard Malcolm Johnston
- Richard Malcolm Johnston (March 8, 1822 – September 23, 1898) was an American educator and author.
- Johnson was born in Powelton, Hancock County, Georgia.
- His father was a Baptist minister, and his early education was received at a country school and finished at Mercer University.
- After graduating there he spent a year teaching and then took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1843.
- In 1857, he accepted an appointment to the chair of belles-lettres and oratory at the University of Georgia in Athens, retaining it until the opening of the Civil War, when he began a school for boys on his farm near Sparta.
- This he kept going during the war, serving also for a time on the staff of General J.E.
- Brown, and helping to organize the state militia. At the close of the war he moved to Maryland, where he opened the Penn Lucy School for boys near Baltimore.
- One of his teaching staff was Georgia-born poet Sidney Lanier, who persuaded him to begin to write for publication, although he was then more than 50 years old.
- His first stories were sent to the Southern Magazine; others to The Century followed, and became immediately popular.
- He had the knack of story-telling that depicted the homely children of the soil, quaint characters that filled the memories of his youth, and he embalmed their fading images with facility and a faithful regard to accuracy that preserved the bourgeois type of old Middle Georgia.
- His style was serene and facile, mingling humour with moral philosophy.
- As a critic he had poetic sympathy with wise discrimination. Johnston became a Catholic in 1875.
- His wife Frances Manfield, of old New England stock, had been received into the Church six months earlier.
- He relates that he was 30 years old when he first saw a priest, and that his first investigations into the faith were during the "Know-Nothing" campaign of 1855, when he read some of Bishop England's and Cardinal Newman's works to confute a political opponent.
- With his conversion the attendance at his school, which was long associated with Baptist patronage, declined, and he gave it up and devoted himself entirely to literature — his popularity as a story writer having steadily increased — and to lecturing on literary topics.
- His published works include: Dukesborough Tales (1871–81), in which the impressions of his early school days in Georgia were elaborated; Old Mark Langston (1884); Two Gray Tourists (1885); Mr.
- Absolom Billingslea and Other Georgia Folks (1888); The Primes (1891); Widow Guthrie (1890); Ogeechee Cross Firings (1889); Old Times in New Georgia (1897); a Life of Alexander H.
- Stephens with whom he had been associated in law practice (1878).
- A collection of essays was published in 1881, and he prepared a Historical Sketch of English Literature (1872), a textbook for advanced students, used at Johns Hopkins University and other institutions at which he gave lecture courses. He died in Baltimore, Maryland.
Read more at Wikipedia