Alexander Edwin Sweet was born on March 28, 1841, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, to James and Charlotte Sweet. His father was a successful dry goods merchant. The family moved to San Antonio, Texas, in 1849, and he attended school there before enrolling in the College Hill Collegiate Institute. He graduated in 1858 and spent the next few years at the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe in present-day Germany. He married Marie Zittel there on May 5, 1862, and they had at least five children: Annie, born around 1863; Louis, born around 1868; Alexander, born around 1870; James, born around 1872; and Norman, born around 1875.

 

He returned to Texas around 1862 and served in the Confederate cavalry. He studied law in San Antonio after leaving the army. By 1870, he was working as a lawyer, and he owned $2,500 of real estate and $400 of personal property. He also began working as a journalist in the late 1860s, first at the San Antonio Express and then the San Antonio Herald. In 1879, he began associate editor of the Galveston Daily News.

 

Sweet’s father died in December 1880, and he resigned from the News soon afterward. He settled in Austin, Texas, and purchased the Austin Weekly Review, which he transformed into Texas Siftings and expanded to a regular circulation of 50,000 copies. Under his direction, the paper received national acclaim. Another Texas reporter observed that “Mr. Sweet’s reputation as a humorous writer is so well known that it is almost unnecessary to allude to it. It is acknowledged that at present his sketches are more widely copied and quoted than those of any other writer in the U.S.”

 

A New York journalist agreed that “Mr. Sweet’s sketches, paragraphs and bon mots are second to no living writer in freshness, originality, sparkling wit, and refined humor.” Sweet moved to paper to New York City in 1884 and eventually achieved a circulation of 150,000. He died in New York City on May 10, 1901.

 

Image: Alexander Edwin Sweet (Harpers New Monthly Magazine, April 1890)

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