James Kirke Paulding, born in Great Nine Partners, New York, to William and Catherine Ogden Paulding, took great pride in his Dutch ancestry; and the English subjection of the Dutch was partial cause for the anti-British feelings which dominate much of the work of his middle period. James's father, a colonel and commissary in the New York militia during the American Revolution, ruined himself financially by extending credit to the army, eventually lost his home, and was imprisoned for debt. Paulding's schooling in rural Tarrytown, New York, was erratic. He claimed, however, to have read Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World (1762) twenty times and stated that it was his model for English prose. In one of his autobiographical tales, "Dyspepsy" (first published in Tales of the Good Woman , (1829), he wrote of nature hikes and characterized his youth thus: "I was eternally thinking and doing nothing."

In 1797 Paulding...