Hartford Wits

The Hartford Wits were a group of young writers from Connecticut in the late 18th century including John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, and Lemuel Hopkins. Originally the Connecticut Wits, the group formed in the late 18th century as a literary society at Yale College and then assumed a new name, the Hartford Wits. Their writings satirized an outmoded curriculum and, more significantly, society and the politics of the mid-1780s.