page_title: John Neal (writer)
section_title: Temperance
hierarchical_section_title: John Neal (writer) / Activism / Temperance
context_page_description: John Neal was an American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist. Considered both eccentric and influential, he delivered speeches and wrote magazine essays, novels, poems, and short stories between the 1810s and 1870s in the US and Great Britain, championing American literary nationalism and regionalism in their earliest stages. Neal advanced the development of American art, advocated for early feminist causes, advocated the end of slavery and racism, and helped establish the gymnastics movement in the US.
  A pioneer of colloquialism and natural diction, John Neal is the first author to use "son-of-a-bitch" in a work of fiction. He attained his greatest literary achievements between 1817 and 1835, during which time he was central to American literature's evolution from the British influences dominant in works of founding American authors James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, whom he derided, to the new voices of American Renaissance authors Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, all of whom he influenced.
context_section_description: Neal adopted personal convictions against drinking to excess in his childhood that he maintained throughout his life, but he did not become associated with the temperance movement until after he returned to Portland, Maine from London. His first invitation to lecture an audience was for the annual address for the Portland Association for the Promotion of Temperance at the First Parish Church in February 1829. Neal Dow, John Neal's cousin, was a core leader of the local movement toward prohibition policy, and in 1836 Neal engaged in public debates with his cousin, defending moderate wine drinking as an alternative to total abstinence. It was in this period between the late 1830s and late 1840s that Neal became disillusioned with the temperance movement, which had moved away from a focus on moral suasion to enacting prohibition law, with Dow and his followers “instead of regarding the injunction, 'Be temperate in all things,' were furiously intemperate on the subject of temperance; making total abstinence the condition of citizenship, and almost of civilization.” Neal remained convinced of “the evils of intemperance... They could not well be exaggerated; the only question was about the remedy.”
caption: Mary Wollstonecraft, the primary influence of John Neal's early women's rights essays
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