Lindley Murray

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Lindley Murray (1745–1826), grammarian, was born in Pennsylvania, and practised as a lawyer. He was the eldest son of Robert Murray, the Quaker merchant whose home was on a hill in Manhattan on what today is Park Avenue. This was the center of an area known to this day as Murray Hill.

Murray was forced into exile after the Revolution as a loyalist, settling in York, England, where a Quaker community existed. In England, Lindley began writing school textbooks. He wrote eleven of them, beginning in 1798, and became the largest-selling author in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. Known as the "Father of English Grammar," Murray's textbooks were widely printed in Britain (particularly his English Grammar) but had their greatest success in the new United States, partly because no international copyright agreement existed and the books could be reprinted without royalties being paid. Some sixteen million copies of Murray's books were sold in America and another four million in Britain. His most popular work was his English Reader, full of selections from the liberal-minded writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, most notably the Rev. Hugh Blair. Abraham Lincoln praised the English Reader as "the best schoolbook ever put in the hands of an American youth". The English Reader utterly dominated the American market for readers for over a generation from 1815 into the 1840s. It was replaced mainly by the McGuffey Readers, a series of reading texts, which began to appear in 1836.

For the last sixteen years of his life he was confined to the house.

This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J.M. Dent & sons; New York, E.P. Dutton.