David Humphreys was a leading member of the Connecticut Wits, often called the first American school of poets. During the Revolution he attained a reputation as Washington's confidant and was a patriotic poet whose verses were widely read. After the war he wrote a popular, inspirational biography of the Revolutionary War general Israel Putnam. He probably originated the plan for The Anarchiad, a series of poems that he wrote with fellow Connecticut Wits Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins. Satirizing "faction" and advocating the kind of strong central government that soon emerged from the Constitutional Convention, the poems appeared in the New-Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine in 1786-1787. In 1793 his works figured prominently in the contents of American Poems, Selected and Original, the first anthology of American poetry, edited by Elihu Hubbard Smith, one of the younger Connecticut Wits. Humphreys's revised Miscellaneous Works (1804) is one of the...