He developed a series of school books, The Standard Speaker and The Standard Reader, which were used in Boston schools for many years. In 1858 he started a children's monthly periodical, Sargent's School Monthly, but by the end of the year it was absorbed by the magazine, Forrester's Playmate. [9]

Sargent was a very respected literary figure by the time he returned to Boston in 1847, when he became editor to The Boston Evening Transcript. It was noted that under his care the newspaper "showed an increasing tenderness toward the Abolitionists". [7] In 1848 he married Elizabeth Weld (1820–1902); the couple had no children. At an 1851 celebration in Salem, Massachusetts, the Boston Cadet Band gave the new clipper ship Witch of the Wave a lively sendoff by striking up "A Life on the Ocean Wave" as the SS R. B. Forbes towed the new clipper out to set sail for Boston. [2] Epes Sargent was the son of Epes Sargent (1784–1853) and Hannah Dane Coffin (1787–1819), [ citation needed] and was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on September 27, 1813, where his father was a ship master. [1] In 1818 the family moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts. From 1823 to 1829 he attended the Boston Latin School, but his education was put on hold while he traveled for six months to Saint Petersburg, Russia with his father. Upon his return he helped start the school's first literary journal, where he wrote about his travels to Russia. He then attended Harvard University where he contributed to the Harvard Collegian, a college literary journal which was started by his older brother, John Osborn Sargent (1811–1891), who became a successful politician and journalist. [2] [3] Career [ edit ] First masthead from Sargent's School Monthly, January 1858 His monumental book, Harper's Cyclopaedia of British and American Poets (1881), was not published until after his death. Sargent died in Boston from oral cancer on December 30, 1880. [2] Works [ edit ]Miller, Tice L. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Southern Illinois University, 2007: 81. ISBN 978-0-8093-2778-2 Underwood, Francis henry (1893). The Builders of American Literature: Biographical Sketches of American Authors Born Previous to 1826. Boston: Lee and Shepard. pp.199–201.

Sargent became captivated with the notion of communicating with "the beyond". He hosted many séances, and philosophical discussions. He published Planchette, or the Despair of Science (1869), The Proof Palpable of Immortality (1875), and The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism (1880). [4]The tune, played by the Band of the Royal Marines, is played over the opening credits of the 1992 BBC television film An Ungentlemanly Act, about the first days of the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Sargent, Paul Dudley". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton. Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 30. ISBN 0-86576-008-X