McDOWELL, Katherine Sherwood, author, born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, 26 February, 1849; died there, 22 July, 1884. She was educated in seminaries in Mississippi and Alabama, as her family moved from place to place in advance of the National forces. She married Edward McDowell at Holly Springs in 1870, and in 1872 removed to Boston, where for several years she was private secretary to Henry W. Longfellow, who predicted for her success in literature. Her first contribution to the press that attracted attention was a poem entitled "The Radical Club." The club, which she described as the "den of the unknowable" and the "cave of the unintelligible," is said to have been killed by the poem. In 1878 she returned to Holy Springs, in the midst of the yellow-fever epidemic, to nurse her father and brother, Her publications, which appeared under the pen-name of "Sherwood Bonner," include " Like unto Like" (Boston, 1881) and " Dialect Tales" (1884).