Works Overview

In a letter to Oakes Smith in the late 1840s, the poet Lydia Sigourney marveled at Oakes Smith’s literary productivity—quite a statement given the fact that Sigourney was known, herself, as such a prolific poet that her Hartford neighbor Mark Twain included a satiric portrait of her in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as Emmeline Grangerford, a “natural” poet who

didn’t ever have to stop to think. . . .she would slap down a line, and if she couldn’t find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch

it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn’t particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to

write about just so it was sadful.

But beyond her productivity (a necessity, given that for much of her life, this was her only source of income) one of the remarkable facts of Oakes Smith’s writing career is that she wrote in every major genre—novel, drama, poetry, short story, lecture, essay, memoir, and private journal, employing many variations and subgenera of all those.

You’ll find them all in our “Works” section, which offers students and scholars the most complete bibliography of Oakes Smith’s writing you’ll find anywhere, with many items hyperlinked to provided access to scans of original publications available on the web (via Hathitrust), or, in some cases typescripts prepared by those developing this site. While standard reference works like the Dictionary of Literary Bibliography might be expected to share the basics when it comes to Oakes Smith’s major works, like novels, in fact, since 2016, students and scholars have discovered one full-length serialized novel (The Two Wives) and two novels Oakes Smith left complete or nearly complete in manuscript (“The Queen of Tramps” and another without its cover page that we’ve tentatively entitled “Rachel Vaughn”). In the past few years we’ve also produced rough typescripts of “The Queen of Tramps” and Oakes Smith’s play variously titled “The Destiny” or “Massienello.”

Given these relatively recent discoveries and developments in Oakes Smith bibliography, we can’t be sure we’ve finally found all her long works, but it’s very obvious to all that our list of poems by Oakes Smith represents only a small percentage of those she published in her lifetime. Researchers who discover works not included on this site are invited to contact the webmaster at t-scherman@neiu.edu so we can add those we haven’t yet found or uploaded to the site.

The drop-down menu under “Works” is arranged by genre, and within those pages, by date.