Oliver Wendell Holmes, American man of letters and physician, was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1809, the son of Abiel Holmes. He was graduated from Harvard in 1829 and received his M.D. from Harvard in 1836, after which he practiced medicine in Boston. From 1838-40 he was Professor of Anatomy at Dartmouth, and at the Harvard Medical School from 1847-82. He wrote a number of medical pamphlets of considerable importance, among which was "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever" (1842). He brought out a volume of poems in 1836, and verse written in throughout his life proved many familiar poems for Americans, a happy blending of the humorous and the pathetic. But his literary fame began in 1857 with "The Autocrat At The Breakfast Table," a series of light, witty talks published in the first numbers of the Atlantic Monthly. This was followed by the series "The Professor At The Breakfast Table" in 1860 and "The Poet At The Breakfast Table" in 1872. His novels "Elsie Venner" in 1861, "The Guardian Angel" in 1867, and "A Mortal Antipathy" were not successful, but have been called the first American psychological novels. Oliver Wendell Holmes died in 1894. He was elected to the American Hall of Fame in 1910. His son Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) was Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1902-1932.