John Neal was an American author, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist. Between the 1810s and 1870s, he gave lectures and wrote essays, novels, poetry, and short tales in the United States and Great Britain, advocating American literary nationalism and regionalism at their inception. Neal contributed to the creation of American art, battled for women's rights, championed the abolition of slavery and racial prejudice, and helped establish the American gymnastics movement. Neal, the first American novelist to employ natural diction and a pioneer of colloquialism, coined the phrase "son-of-a-bitch" in a work of fiction. He achieved his greatest literary achievements between 1817 and 1835, when he was America's first daily newspaper columnist, the first American to be published in British literary journals, the author of the first history of American literature, America's first art critic, a short story pioneer, a children's literature pioneer, and a precursor to the American Renaissance.
