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Two College Friends (1871) is a novel by Frederick W. Loring. Published in the last year of the author’s life, Loring’s debut novel is a powerful story of male friendship and homosexual desire that shifts from college campus to battlefield in a series of diary entries, letters, and narrative sections. Partly inspired by Loring’s life at Harvard, the novel was dedicated to his estranged friend William Chamberlain, who likely served as a model for the character Tom. The Professor, who acts as a mediator between the two young men, was modeled on an unnamed teacher who mentored the author at Harvard and died as Loring “was writing the opening pages of [the] story.” Tragic, romantic, patriotic, and bittersweet, Two College Friends is an important work of fiction by an author whose life was cut short before he reached the age of twenty-three.

Frederick W. Loring (1848-1871) was an American poet, novelist, and journalist. Born in Boston, he was a distant grandson of English settler Thomas Loring, who arrived in New England in 1634. Educated at Phillips Academy and Harvard University, Loring showed early promise as a writer and literary scholar, no doubt stemming from his late mother’s encouragement and love of reading. After graduating from college, where he contributed to the Harvard Advocate literary magazine, Loring published a novel, Two College Friends (1871), and a poetry collection entitled The Boston Dip and Other Verses (1871). Over the next year, he found publication in such journals and periodicals as The Atlantic Monthly, The Independent, Every Saturday, and Appleton’s Journal. For the latter, Loring left in spring of 1871 to report on the expedition of Lieutenant George M. Wheeler to Arizona. In November of that year, having passed through Death Valley at the height of summer and published several articles for Appleton’s, Loring was among six stagecoach passengers killed in an attack by a group of Yavapai in the vicinity of Wickenburg Arizona. He is remembered today as a talented writer whose promising career was cut short before it could fully blossom. Loring’s only novel has been praised as a pioneering story of male homosexuality for its depiction of young men united by friendship, romance, and tragedy.