Freedom's Champion: Elijah Lovejoy

In this successful adult version of his 1964 YA biography of Elijah Lovejoy, Martyr to Freedom, Illinois Senator Simon (like Lovejoy, was an Illinois newspaper editor and the son of a Lutheran minister) follows his hero from a fundamentalist religious upbringing through his stormy career in heavily Catholic St. Louis in the 1800s as editor of the St. Louis Times and later of the Protestant Observer. Because of his abolitionist and anti-Catholic campaigns in a slave state, and despite his move to Alton in free-territory Illinois, he was fatally shot in 1837 at age 35 by a mob who destroyed his press as well. His murderers escaped punishment. Lovejoy attracted national attention for his stance that slavery was ``a sin,'' and for organizing a widely attended antislavery Conference in Alton a few weeks before his death. Photos not seen by PW. (Dec.)