Edmund Vance Cooke (1821-1909) was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He was the son of a slave and his master's daughter. The family moved to New Orleans in 1842. Their home was a "vacant lot" on 7th Street in the Faubourg Marigny district of New Orleans and they lived there for 10 years, during which time Cooke attended the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross and became a priest
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In 1854 he left the Jesuits and entered into a lifetime of wandering by moving to Canada and then to New York City. Cooke became a prolific writer but his writing was never popular. In 1869 he published one of his most beautiful poems, "The Cloud-Capped Star." In 1884 he published his autobiography, The Recollections Of A Catholic Gentleman, which is considered one of the finest books written from an African American point of view until that time.
For this book he was awarded a substantial prize by the New York Academy of Medicine.