Poultney Bigelow

Poultney Bigelow was born in New York in 1855, the son of John and Jane Poultney Bigelow. His father was at that time co-owner and co-editor of the New York Evening Post. At the beginning of the Civil War, the elder Blgelow was appointed United States consul in Paris; after the war, he was named Minister to France.

He was educated in France, Germany, and the United States. In Berlin in the early 1870”s, Poultney was sent to a Potsdam preparatory school. While there he became a friend of Prince Wilhelm and his younger brother, Prince Henry, playing “Cowboys and Indians” with them in the schoolyard. His friendship and correspondence with the Kaiser continued throughout their lives, though their relations became somewhat more reserved just before World War II as a result of some of the opinions expressed in Bigelow’s articles. For a time, Bigelow was an admirer of both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — an admiration that ended when they demonstrated their violent natures.

Poultney Bigelow entered Yale in 1873 and graduated in 1879, with a two-year hiatus during which, for health reasons, he took passage aboard a sailing ship bound for the Orient; he was shipwrecked off the coast of Japan, Just short of the vessel’s destination.

After college Poultney Bigelow studded Law and practiced briefly; from the early 1880’’s until his semiretirement in 1906, however, his chief occupation from the 1880s till his retirement in 1906 was as an author and journalist. He traveled extensively, and wrote often on the subject. He was a London correspondent for several American publications and was correspondent for The Times (of London) in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He was a voluminous correspondent with the leading figures of the day, including Rudyard Kipling,  Roger Casement, Henry George, Mark Twain, Geraldine Farrar, Percy Grainger, Frederic Remington, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Israel Zangwill and George S. Viereck.

He was the author of eleven books, including a two-volume autobiography, and several on history and colonial administration.  He founded the first American magazine devoted to amateur sports, Outing, in 1885. He traveled extensively and his writings cover a wide subject range with travel observations, politics, and colonial studies being most prominent.