George W Bungay

George Washington Bungay (July 22, 1818 – July 10, 1892). Born in Walsingham, England, he immigrated with his family to the United States in 1827 at age nine. Bungay was a poet, journalist, biographer, and anti-slavery and temperance reformer. In 1855 he established a brief-lived newspaper in Ilion, New York. His reform politics were reflected in The Independent’s motto, "Independent in All Things, Neutral in Nothing." Following the newspaper’s financial failure the following year, Bungay joined the editorial staff of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the best-known and most influential newspaper in the United States of that day. There Bungay acquired a reputation as a reform writer and worked with such famed writers as George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, Fanny Fern, Bayard Taylor, Whitelaw Reid and many others. He also enjoyed a successful career as a lyricist for Stephen Collins Foster ("Better Times Are Coming") and John Payne ("Home, Sweet Home"), the most popular American composers of the 19th century. His poetical works include "Acrostics and Miscellaneous Poems" (1837) and the epic poem "Nebraska" (1854), which chronicles the introduction of slavery in that state.