Some Famous Unitarian Universalists

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)*
Horatio Alger (1834-1899)*
P.T. Barnum (1810-1891)
Bela Bartok*
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
Ray Bradbury
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
Robert Burns*
Alice Cary (1820-1871)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Norman Cousins
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
Nathaniel Currier* (1813-1888)
Charles Dickens*
Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)*
Fannie Farmer (1857-1915)
Robert Fulghum
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
Edvard Grieg*
Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)
Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper Bret Harte (1836-1902)*
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)*
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894)*
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
Jordan Jones
Luigi von Kunits
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Margaret Laurence (1926-)
Michael Learned
Dorothy Livesay (1909-)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henrick Van Loon
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)*
Edwin Markham (1852-1940)
John Milton (1608-1674)
Herman Melville*

Also...
Robert Munsch
Paul Newman (1925-)
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)*
Malvina Reynolds
Carl Sandberg (1878-1967)
May Sarton
Pete Seeger (1919-)
Rod Serling
Robert Shaw (1927-1978)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Lister Sinclair
Jerry Sohl
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1896)*
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)*
Kurt Vonnegut
Dan Wakefield
John Greenleaf Whittier
Frank Lloyd Wright*

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Alexander Graham Bell*
Tim Berners-Lee
Elizabeth Blackwell
T. Berry Brazelton
Luther Burbank*

Also...
Peter Cooper
Charles Darwin
Edmund Halley
Lewis Latimer
Samuel F.B. Morse*
Isaac Newton
Linus C. Pauling
Joseph Priestley*
Benjamin Rush
Lyman Spitzer
Vilhajalmur Stefansson (1879-1962)
Charles P. Steinmetz (1865-1923)
Emily Stowe*
Clyde Tombaugh

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Abigail Adams*
John Adams*
John Quincy Adams*
John C. Calhoun
William S. Cohen
Millard Fillmore*
Benjamin Franklin*
Horace Greeley*
Hannibal Hamlin
Thomas Jefferson*
William J. Perry
Also...
James Madison
Wendell Phillips
Elliot L. Richardson
Francis George Shaw
Col. Robert Gould Shaw
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)*
William Howard Taft*
Daniel Webster*

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Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)*
Adin Ballou (1803-1890)
Samuel G. Howe
Julia Ward Howe*
Josephine Shaw Lowell
Lucy Stone*

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Clara Barton (1821-1912)*
Dorothea Dix*
Florence Nightingale
Albert Schweitzer*

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Jane Addams (1860-1935)
Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)
Ethan Allen
Clarence Darrow
Harriet Martineau
Thomas Paine
Lydia Pinkham
Paul Revere*
Whitney Young*

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Ezra Cornell
Charles W. Eliot*
Mark Hopkins*
Horace Mann*
Elizabeth Peabody
Leland Stanford
George W. Stoddard

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William Ellery Channing
Robert Collyer
A. Powell Davies
Samuel A. Eliot
Sophia Lyon Fahs
Dana Greeley
Edward Everett Hale
Lotta Hitschmanova
Thomas Starr King
Judith Sargent Murray
John Murray
Theodore Parker Clinton
Lee Scott
Edwin H. Wilson

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(thanks to Lorella Thomas for the list!!)

* People marked with an asterisk have appeared on postage stamps (in most cases, US stamps). Please see the UU stamps page

It is impossible to compile a list without generating a certain amount of controversy about whether each individual is or was "really" a UU.

Some of these people are or were official members of Unitarian, Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist congregations. Some whose private religious views are unknown may be listed here because of a strong personal or family connection to UUism.

Others are on the list as explicit sympathizers with UU principles, even though they did not formally belong to any church. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, remained unchurched despite confiding in letters to friends his perfect agreement with the views of prominent Unitarian preachers of his day. "The Jefferson Bible" is included among the links from this page so readers can decide for themselves whether Jefferson's view of Jesus and his teachings is consistent with modern UU thought.

UUs tend to be proprietary in claiming our friends as "UUs-at-heart," sometimes without sufficient regard for the religious affiliations those friends affirm for themselves.

It is my intention that, while claiming some "unchurched" UU sympathizers, this page will not list people as UUs who actually identified themselves as belonging to another denomination. If I have failed to enforce this standard, please let me know.

I apologize to anyone, living or dead, who is misrepresented on this page.

Additions and corrections, please, to:

Lorella Thomas: FamousUUs@aol.com.