Tales About America and Australia
Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860) was an American author, better known under the pseudonym Peter Parley. He was largely self-educated, and became an assistant in a country store at Danbury, Connecticut, which he left in 1808, and later again at Hartford, Connecticut, until 1811. From 1816 to 1822 he was a bookseller and publisher in Hartford. He visited Europe from 1823 to 1824, and moved to Boston in 1826. From 1828 to 1842 published an illustrated annual, The Token, to which he was a frequent contributor both in prose and verse. A selection from these contributions was published in 1841 under the title Sketches From a Students Window. In 1841 he established Merrys Museum, which he continued to edit till 1854. In 1827 he began, under the name of Peter Parley, his series of books for the young, which embraced geography, biography, history, science and miscellaneous tales. In 1857 he wrote that he was the author and editor of about 170 volumes, and that about seven millions had been sold.