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John William De Forest was born in Seymour (Humphreysville), Connecticut, on 31 March 1826. He attended private schools until ill-health forced him to depart from the United States in January, 1846, for a sojourn in the Near East where he resided with his brother, Henry, a medical missionary, in the Levant. De Forest returned to his native Connecticut in the autumn of 1847.
After completing his first book, History of the Indians of Connecticut, he journeyed to Europe in the winter of 1850 and remained on the continent, living in Italy, central Europe, and France, until the spring of 1855, when he once again returned to the United States.
On 5 June 1856 De Forest married Harriet Silliman Shepard, daughter of Charles Upham Shepard, professor of chemistry in the Charleston (S. C.) Medical College and Amherst College. Their only child, Louis, was born 23 February 1857. In 1859, Amherst awarded De Forest an honorary M.A.
In the autumn of 1861, De Forest volunteered his services to the Army of the United States and was commissioned captain in the Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers on 1 January 1862, the unit he was to serve with for most of his Civil War service. De Forest saw combat in Louisiana from March, 1862, until 30 January 1864, and took part in the sharp and bloody attacks on Port Hudson on the Mississippi River. From August, 1864, until his discharge from federal service on 2 December 1864, De Forest served in Virginia.
He was not done with military duty, however, and early in 1865, he was nominated for a captaincy in the Veteran Reserve Corps. He served for a time in Washington, D. C., then was transferred to the Freedmen's Bureau and sent to Greenville, South Carolina, where he took charge of the subdistrict, with the title of Acting Assistant Commissioner, on 1 October
De Forest settled in New Haven and began his long, frustrating, and often disappointing career as writer. For over thirteen years, from 1868 to 1881, he published novels, short stories, essays, and poems, but gained little in the way of recognition from the reading public of the day, although he did gain some critical success. The publication of The Bloody Chasm in 1881 brought to a close this busy period in his life, and he was silent, although actively engaged, to some extent, with writing, until 1898, the year his last novel appeared.
In the summer of 1884, De Forest once again went to Europe and lived in France until his return in the spring of 1886. He made at least two attempts to issue a collected edition of his works, but they came to naught. His health, always a serious problem with him, plagued him in the 1890's, and he struggled to remain alive.
The vogue for historical romances which developed in the late years of the nineteenth century brought De Forest out of enforced retirement, and his A Lover's Revolt, a tale of the American Revolution, appeared in the autumn of 1898. He subsequently issued a family history in 1900 and two collections of his poems in 1901 and 1902.
The end was quiet for him, and he died on 17 July 1906 in New Haven. He was buried two days later in the Grove Street cemetery.
There has long been a need for a checklist of De Forest's writings, many of which, especially his short stories, are uncollected and scattered in various periodicals of his day. No foolish claim will be made that this list is exhaustive; indeed it is my hope that other scholars interested in De Forest will add to my efforts. It is just possible that his two manuscript novels, The Senator, lost while De Forest was traveling to New York in 1867, and A Daughter of Toil, written in the 1880's and rejected by Century Magazine and Harper's, will some day be found.
The checklist is divided into (1) book publications, (2) periodical publications. Part III is a list of contemporary reviews.
Acknowledgement should be made to Professor James H. Croushore, Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, for his pioneer work on De Forest. His unpublished doctoral dissertation, John William De Forest; A Biographical and Critical Study to the Year 1868 (Yale, 1944) and editions of A Volunteer's Adventures (New Haven, 1946) and A Union Officer in the Reconstruction (New Haven, 1948) are invaluable to the student of American letters.
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