John Bartlett

thumb| John Bartlett (June 14, 1820 – December 3, 1905) was an American writer and publisher and the editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which he revised continuously and published in several editions. Quotes The object of this work is to show, to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become "household words." Preface to A Collection of Familiar Quotations, 1st ed. (1855) The object of this work is to show, to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become "household words," and "to restore to the temples of poetry the many beautiful fragments which have been stolen from them, and built into the heavy walls of prose." Preface to A Collection of Familiar Quotations, 2nd ed. (1856) Quotes about Bartlett The quotations he chose came chiefly from the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and British writers, but he also drew on the work of a few Americans, among them Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant, as well as his friends and neighbors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. A tireless reader and notetaker, Bartlett had made himself over the years an information bank for the local academic and literary community, a resource for someone wanting to know who said what, when, and where. ... By the time of his death in 1905 at the age of eighty-five, Bartlett had made his name as generic for quotations as Noah Webster's for definitions. Justin Kaplan, Preface to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 17th ed. (2002), p. vii External links John Bartlett