Samuel Griswold Goodrich (August 19, 1793 - May 9, 1860) was an American author better known by his pen name Peter Parley. Goodrich was the son of a Congregational pastor and was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Goodrich was mostly self-taught and worked as an assistant at a rural store in Danbury, Connecticut, which he left in 1808, and afterwards in Hartford, Connecticut, until 1811. He worked as a bookseller and publisher in Hartford from 1816 to 1822. From 1823 to 1824, he traveled throughout Europe before relocating to Boston in 1826. He purchased 45 acres (180, 000 m2) in adjacent Roxbury in 1833 and built a mansion in what is now Jamaica Plain. There he remained in the publishing business, and from 1828 until 1842 he published The Token, an illustrated annual to which he contributed both prose and lyric. He returned to America and wrote Illustrated Natural History of the Animal Kingdom in 1859. He died in New York and was buried in Southbury, Connecticut, where he had lived briefly.
