Charles Fenno Hoffman (February 7, 1806 – June 7, 1884) was an American author, poet and editor associated with the Knickerbocker Group in New York. Biography Hoffman was born in New York City on February 7, 1806. He was the son of New York Attorney General Josiah Ogden Hoffman (1766–1837) and his second wife, Maria (née Fenno) Hoffman (1781–1823). His elder half-brother from his father's first marriage to Mary Colden was Ogden Hoffman, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1837 to 1841. When Charles was 11 years old, his leg was crushed by a boating accident and had to be amputated. Hoffman, who was proud of his ancestry, was the grandson of John Fenno, the Federalist editor of the Gazette of the United States. One aunt, Harriet Fenno (d. 1808), was married to John Rodman, the New York County District Attorney, and other aunt, Mary Eliza Fenno (d. 1817), was married to Gulian C. Verplanck, a New York State Senator and U.S. Representative. He was descended from Martin Hermanzen Hoffman, who emigrated to New Netherland in 1657. He attended New York University and Columbia College, and studied law with Harmanus Bleecker. Hoffman was admitted to the bar in 1827, but he practiced law only intermittently. In 1833, he led a group of other students in the Eucleian Society in establishing The Knickerbocker magazine, which he edited for the first three issues before passing duties on to Timothy Flint, who then passed them to Lewis Gaylord Clark. In 1835, Hoffman edited The New-York Book of Poetry which first attributed A Visit From St. Nicholas to Clement Clarke Moore. In 1836, Park Benjamin, Sr. merged his New England Monthly Magazine with the American Monthly and hired Hoffman as editor, though he left to join the New York Mirror a year later. Hoffman's first book was A Winter in the Far West (1835), recounting his travels as far west as St. Louis, Missouri. It was followed by Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie (1839) based on actual experiences in search of health. He wrote a successful novel, Greyslaer (1840), based on the murder of Colonel Solomon P. Sharp by Jereboam O. Beauchamp, known as the Beauchamp–Sharp Tragedy—an event that several writers, including Thomas Holley Chivers, Edgar Allan Poe and William Gilmore Simms, also fictionalized. Hoffman's version, however, had little in common with the true event. Hoffman's fame rested chiefly