Julia A. Moore, who was known as “The Sweet Singer of Michigan”, is perhaps the most famous bad poet in the history of American literature. As her poems frequently deal with death, she is often described as a “mortuary poet”, a name sometimes given to mediocre writers who dwell on the uncertainty of life in the nineteenth century. Moore was a favourite of Mark Twain, who was inspired by her to create the character of Emmeline Grangerford in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884).
The Sweet Singer of Michigan was born Julia Ann Davis on December 1 1847, in Plainfield, Michigan. On December 1 1864 she married Frederick Franklin Moore, a young farmer, with whom she had ten children, six of whom lived to adulthood. Moore had little education and was not well read; in 1878, near the
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Citation: Rachels, David. "Julia A. Moore". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 July 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3179, accessed 23 November 2024.]
