A member of one of the most illustrious families of his time, William Livingston gained renown as a lawyer, polemic journalist, patriot, politician, and to a lesser extent, as a poet. His was one of the earliest voices against British rule, the satirizing of which earned him a seat in the Continental Congress. He later became the first governor of the State of New Jersey and was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. His long poem, Philosophic Solitude, was the major item included in the first anthology of American poetry, American Poems, Selected and Original (1793), edited by Elihu Hubbard Smith.

Livingston, the son of Philip and Catharine Van Brugh Livingston, was born at Albany and remained a New Yorker for almost half a century. He spent a part of his boyhood traveling with an English missionary among the Mohawk Indians, learning the language and ways of the Mohawks...