Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820)

He was born in New York City and was orphaned by the age of sixteen. He was educated at Columbia College, and since childhood had always displayed a talent for writing and poetry. He began his career studying medicine and in 1819, together with his friend and fellow poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, calling themselves "The Croakers" they wrote a series of satirical verses for the New York Evening Post. Drake died just a year later at the age of twenty-five. A collection his poems, The Culprit Fay & Other Poems, were published posthumously by his daughter in 1835. His best-known poems are "The American Flag" (set as a cantata for two soloists, choir and orchestra by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák in 1892-93) and "The Culprit Fay" that was the inspiration for an orchestral rhapsody of the same name by Henry Kimball Hadley in 1908. Halleck's poem "Green be the Turf above Thee" was written as a memorial to Drake.

He was part of the "Knickerbocker Group", which also included among others Halleck, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Kirke Paulding, Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, Robert Charles Sands, Lydia M. Child, and Nathaniel Parker Willis. In 1816, he married Sarah, daughter of the New York shipbuilder Henry Eckford, whose sister married Gabriel Irving, nephew of Washington Irving. The Drakes had one daughter (listed).