HIRST, Henry Beck. Endymion. A Tale of Greece.
Boston: William D. Ticknor & Company, 1848.
8vo.; brown boards with paper spine label printed in black; worn along spine.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed to “His Excellency, Hon. U.S. Grant, President U.S.A. from the Author Philadelphia, June 1st 1869,” on the second flyleaf.
Famous for his loud and ceaseless protestations that he, and not Edgar Allen Poe, wrote “The Raven,” Henry Beck Hirst (1817-1874) was one of the more eccentric men of letters in nineteenth century America. He was a close friend, or at least drinking companion, of Poe for several years, and their binges may have watered the soil out of which Hirst’s claims of literary theft later emerged. He published several collections of poems in the 1840s, and Endymion was his most ambitious work. It was not the only one he inscribed for Ulysses Grant. Hirst sent several of his books to the president, often including notes in which he falsely claimed to have received an honorary degree from Oxford. Early on in Grant’s first term Hirst went completely insane and shambled through the streets under the delusion that he had become Ulysses Grant. He was institutionalized in an asylum, where he died in 1874.