He was admitted to the bar in 1888, and practiced law until 1898. Meanwhile, he had attracted attention as an essayist of unusual merit. His work is marked by originality and felicity of expression, and the opinion of many critics has placed him in the front rank of the American essayists of his day.[6][7]
In 1912, on the one-year anniversary of the lynching of Zachariah Walker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Chapman gave a speech in which he called the lynching "one of the most dreadful crimes in history" and said "our whole people are...involved in the guilt." It was published as A Nation's Responsibility.
Chapman became involved in politics[8] and joined the City Reform Club and the Citizens' Union. He was opposed to the Tammany Hall political and business grouping, which at that time dominated New York City.[9] He lectured on the need for reform and edited the journal The Political Nursery (1897-1901).[10]
Personal life
Chapman was known as a passionate romantic in his personal life as well as his writing. As a law student at Harvard, he once beat a rival (astronomer Percival Lowell[11]) for a woman's love in a fight, then felt such deep remorse that he deliberately burned off his left hand as a form of self-punishment.[12] He would later brandish the stump as evidence of his passion.[13]
Portrait of Chapman's second wife, Elizabeth Astor Winthrop Chanler (1866-1937), by John Singer Sargent.
On July 2, 1889, he married Minna Timmins (1861–1897), with whom he had three children:
Victor Emmanuel Chapman (1890–1916), the first American aviator to die in France during World War I.[1][14] After Victor's death, Chapman published a memoir of his son's early life, including his letters sent from France. The letters inspired the composer Charles Loeffler, a friend of Chapman's, to write the string quartet, Music for Four Stringed Instruments.[15]
John Jay Chapman, Jr. (1893–1903), who drowned at Romerbad, Austria, age 9.[1]
Conrad Chapman (1896–1989), who was engaged to Dorothy Daphne McBurney (1912–1997) in 1934,[16] but married Judith Daphne Kemp (1906–1999) in England in 1937.[17]
Chanler Armstrong Chapman (1901–1982),[19] who married Olivia James, a niece of Henry James. They divorced and in 1948, he married the former Helen Riesenfeld, a writer.[20] After her death in 1970, he married Dr. Ida R. Holzbert Wagman in 1972.[21] Chanler Chapman reportedly served as a model for Eugene Henderson, the main character in Saul Bellow's 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King.[19]
^"The relationship between Chapman's writings and his family history received more attention at midcentury. Chapman's grandmother was an ardent abolitionist and colleague of William Lloyd Garrison. Her grandson inherited her crusading spirit, but substituted the influence of money in politics for slavery." — Russello, Gerald J. (1999). "A Hero for the Truth,"The New Criterion, Vol. 17, p. 74.
^Stocking, David (1960). "John Jay Chapman and Political Reform," American Quarterly, Vol. 2, No.1, pp. 62-70.
^Usher, Shaun (2020). Letters of Note: Love. Canongate. p. 58. ISBN9781786895325.
^"John Jay Chapman". January 2001. Retrieved 3 Feb 2022. In a horrifying episode when he was a law student, he assaulted and beat a supposed rival in love and later, tormented by remorse, deliberately burned his left hand in a coal fire so badly it had to be amputated.
^Morris, Edmund (1979). The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. ISBN0-375-75678-7. Chapman was a man of near-manic passions, both romantic and intellectual. As testimony to the former, he would brandish the stump of a missing left hand, which he had deliberately burned to a cinder as self-punishment during a stormy love affair.
Baltzell, E. Digby (1987). The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America, Yale University Press.
Bernstein, Melvin H. (1957). The Mind of John Jay Chapman, Monthly Review Press.
Bernstein, Melvin H. (1964). John Jay Chapman, Twayne Publishers.
Brown, Stuart Gerry (1952). "John Jay Chapman and the Emersonian Gospel," The New England Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 147–180.
Howe, M. A. De Wolfe (1937). John Jay Chapman and his Letters, Houghton Mifflin Company.
Paul, Sherman (1960). "The Identities of John Jay Chapman," The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 255–262.
Peel, Robin (2005). "John Jay Chapman, 'Social Order and Restraints': The Custom of the Country (1913)." In Apart from Modernism: Edith Wharton, Politics, and Fiction Before World War I, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 197–224.
Wilson, Edmund (1938; 1948). The Triple Thinkers, Harcourt, Brace and Company; Oxford University Press, pp. 133–164.
