American author, born in Middletown, CT, on the 23rd of January 1761. Meant for a mercantile career, he studied at Yale College, but desiring to devote himself entirely to literature, he left college before the completion of his course. He organized the “Hartford Wits,” an association of active local littérateurs of strong Federal sympathies, who were relentless in their ridicule of all that did not meet their approval. The vehicle for these effusions was the publication called The Echo, which appeared, in series, from 1791 to 1795, republished in collected form in 1807. Alsop had a powerful influence on public opinion and was strongly anti-Democratic. He published, among other works, a Monody on the Death of Washington (1800); The Enchanted Lake of the Fairy Morgana (1808); The Natural and Civil History of Chili, a translation of an interesting work by the Italian, Juan Ignacio Molina. He died in Flushing, Long Island, on the 20th of August 1815. See also “To the Shade of Washington.”
