John Turvill Adams was an American novelist. He was a Connecticut legislator and a former lawyer. He died in Norwich on March 30, 1882. Adams was born on September 29, 1805, in Demerara, South America (now Guyana), to English parents. His father, Richard Adams, moved to Norwich, Connecticut in 1810, and the boy enrolled at Yale College, from where he graduated in 1824. In 1824, he began studying law at the Hon. Samuel J. Hitchcock's law school in New Haven, and while there, he produced a small volume of poems in 1825, but he soon went into the dry-goods jobbing business in New York City, partnering with Felix A. Huntington of Norwich. In 1828, he founded the Telegraph in Stonington, Connecticut, which was incorporated the next year into the Norwich Republican, where Adams served as editor until 1834. Around this time, he was admitted to the bar, and in 1835, he was elected Judge of Probate, but he only served for a brief time before quitting to relocate to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and later to Michigan. He returned to Norwich around 1844 and gave up practicing law in 1850. He eventually devoted himself to literary interests, publishing several stories on American life, including The Lost Hunter (New York, 1856) and The Knight of the Golden Melice (New York, 1860).
