A Man on Fire by Douglas Egerton

A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

By Douglas Egerton

Oxford University Press 2025

As is obvious from the title, A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by LeMoyne College history professor Douglas Egerton tells the life story of the famous writer and orator Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a national figure once universally hailed and now largely forgotten, and the book promptly offers readers an encouraging indication of what kind of biography they’ll be getting here. Take a sample paragraph:

Such was Higginson’s passion that even those reformers and Transcendentalists who did not share his aggressive tactics grudgingly praised them when used in the cause of freedom. In 1854, Higginson joined a handful of Black activists in an unsuccessful attempt to liberate runaway Anthony Burns. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who arrived in Boston only after the attack to deliver a sermon on the affair, conceded that “liberty is aggressive.” Referring specifically to Higginson, who had suffered a sword cut to his chin, Emerson added that “it is only they who save others, that can themselves be saved.” Massachusetts attorney and Free Soil politician Richard Henry Dana Jr. agreed, but expressed surprise at Higginson’s actions, given his genteel background. “I knew his ardor & courage,” Dana later remarked in his memoirs, “but I hardly expected a married man, a clergyman, and a man of education to lead the mob.” Higginson placidly waited to be arrested for his role in the affair, and when asked by a journalist to defend his exploits, simply replied, “I enjoy danger.” Higginson was, Emerson mused, “the only Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, Unitarian minister, and master of seven languages who has led a storming party against a federal bastion with a battering ram in his hands.”

Any reader of biographies will see all that’s going on in just that single paragraph, the reach of Egerton’s research, the way he compacts so much research into such a lean structure. A Man on Fire isn’t long in comparison to most modern biographies, just about 300 pages, but it’s virtually pointillist in its attention to detail.

Extreme, maybe even unsettling detail will spring to the reader’s mind immediately, since the US cover design (by James Perales) partakes of a current fad in historical biography dust jackets, where a blurry old daguerreotype is unearthed from the archives, those of the Massachusetts Historical Society in this case, and then lavishly, almost garishly colorized and enhanced, so that every sweaty pore and old smallpox scar can now be seen across the room. The goal is clearly to remind readers that these old figures from history were once flesh-and-blood living people, but it’s damn unsettling, particularly since to the extent that Higginson is fixed in the public consciousness at all, he’s fixed as a magnificently bearded old man, not the thwarted, sad-eyed dreamer seen on this cover.

By the time he began to experience deteriorating health from ulcers, as an older man, that older Higginson had lived a long life of near-constant activism, although he’d had raised a characteristic quizzical eye at such a term being applied to him. And that activism is the focus of Egerton’s book, which is understandable given the fact that virtually all of the social rights for which Higginson fought and wrote and spoke are now under the most concerted attacks since Higginson’s own day. Although it was the writing that was central to him. “It is as a writer that he deserves to be remembered,” Higginson’s great editor Howard Meyer very correctly asserted. “He should be read for the sheer joy of the reading itself, and his works should be respected enough to serve as models for teaching writing to both writers and students generally.” The grand literary pooh-bah Edmund Wilson remarked grudgingly on Higginson’s “graceful and elegant style” and made the gracious comment that “One hardly notices, in fact, that one is reading.”

But Higginson’s writings are readily available, including a very good volume from Penguin Classics, so although Egerton refers to them often here, it’s perhaps more satisfying to follow the focus on the non-literary man, centrally his fight against slavery in league with the great William Lloyd Garrison. “His reason marched like an army without banners,” Higginson wrote in later life about Garrison, “his invective was scathing, but as it was almost always mainly scriptural, it did not carry an impression of personal anger, but simply seemed like a newly discovered chapter of Ezekiel.”

When all those older Abolitionist titans were gone, the Evening Times-Republican in Marshalltown, Iowa noted that Higginson was “the last of that group of men who made in the middle of the nineteenth century famous for all time to come.” Looking back on his own time, Higginson wrote a notoriously elusive memoir titled Cheerful Yesterdays. Most of the critics of the day noticed that the book dealt more with other people than with its own author, and as Egerton notices, Samuel Clemens and Henry James noticed the book’s nearly-inaudible sadness. “’Higginson’s Cheerful Yesterdays is one long record of disagreeable services which he had to perform to content his spirit,’ Clemens observed. ‘He was always doing the fine and beautiful and brave and disagreeable things that others shrank from and were afraid of – and his as a happy life.’”

It isn’t a particularly happy life that emerges from Egerton’s tightly-packed pages, and the sheer amount of information crammed into every incident, every major and minor moment, sometimes gives A Man on Fire the feel of a doctoral dissertation. But Egerton creates a tense, fast-moving prose line and shapes what is easily the best biography of Higginson in a century. Readers might occasionally wish for more drama from the narrative, but they’ll be freshly amazed at all the drama in the life.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News