Thomas Low Nichols (1815-1901) was a prominent journalist and reformer born in New Hampshire. He began studying medicine at Dartmouth College but later abandoned this for journalism, serving apprenticeships at newspapers in New York and Lowell. He married Mary Gove in 1848, and the couple settled in London during the American Civil War. He was the author of several books on food reform, as well as writing Forty Years of American Life, one of the most important accounts of American life in the nineteenth century.