Thomas H. Shreve, poet and journalist, was born at Alexandria,
Virginia, in 1808. In early life he removed to Louisville, Kentucky,
and entered mercantile pursuits. In 1834 Shreve became a Cincinnati
editor; but four years later he returned to Louisville to again engage
in business. Throughout his business career, Shreve was a constant
contributor of poems and prose sketches to the best magazines. He
finally abandoned business for literature, and he at once became
associate editor of the _Louisville Journal_. He was not a rugged
journalist of the Prentice type, but a cultured and chaste essayist
who should have written from his study window, rather than from such a
seething hothouse of sarcasm and invective as Prentice maintained. He
was a mild-mannered man, a Quaker, who spent his last months on earth
in crossing swords with Thomas Babington Macaulay concerning the
character of William Penn. In 1851 Shreve's _Drayton, an American
Tale_, was issued by the Harpers at New York. This work won the author
much praise in the East as well as in the West, and it started him
upon an honorable career, which was soon cut short by disease. Thomas
H. Shreve died at Louisville, December 23, 1853. Prentice penned a
splendid tribute to the memory of his dead friend and associate; and
some years later a collection of his verse was made as a fitting
memorial of his blameless life and literary labors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Poets and Poetry of the West_, by W. T.
Coggeshall (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); _History of Kentucky_, by R. H.
Collins (Covington, Kentucky, 1882); _The Shreve Family_, by L. P.
Allen (Greenfield, Illinois).