Combining a forceful personality, organizing genius, and liberal practical theology, Hale was active in raising the tone of American life for half a century.
He had a deep interest in the anti-slavery movement (especially in Kansas), as well as popular education (involving himself especially with the Chautauqua adult-education movement), and the working-man's home.

He published a wide variety of works in fiction, history and biography.
He used his writings and the two magazines he founded, Old and New (1870–75) and Lend a Hand (1886–97), to advance a number of social reforms, including religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and wider education.
Writer-educator Mary Lowe Dickinson served as Hale's associate editor for Lend a Hand.

Hale supported Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, as he felt the new workers freed Americans from performing menial, hard labor.
In a series of letters in the Boston Daily Advertiser, he noted the "inferiority" of immigrants: "[it] compels them to go the bottom; and the consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted."

Edward Everett Hale's story “The Man Without a Country" (1863) opened with the sentence: “I was stranded at the old Mission House in Mackinaw, waiting for a Lake Superior steamer which did not choose to come.”
In his 1893 and 1900 reminiscences, E.E. Hale states that ‘To write the story of “The Man Without a Country” and its sequel, “Philip Nolan’s Friends,” I had to make as careful a study as I could of the history of the acquisition of Louisiana by the United States.’
Combining a forceful personality, organizing genius, and liberal practical theology, Hale was active in raising the tone of American life for half a century. He had a deep interest in the anti-slavery movement (especially in Kansas), as well as popular education (involving himself especially with the Chautauqua adult-education movement), and the working-man's home.
He published a wide variety of works in fiction, history and biography. He used his writings and the two magazines he founded, Old and New (1870–75) and Lend a Hand (1886–97), to advance a number of social reforms, including religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and wider education. Writer-educator Mary Lowe Dickinson served as Hale's associate editor for Lend a Hand.
Hale supported Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, as he felt the new workers freed Americans from performing menial, hard labor. In a series of letters in the Boston Daily Advertiser, he noted the "inferiority" of immigrants: "[it] compels them to go the bottom; and the consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted."
Edward Everett Hale's story “The Man Without a Country" (1863) opened with the sentence: “I was stranded at the old Mission House in Mackinaw, waiting for a Lake Superior steamer which did not choose to come.” In his 1893 and 1900 reminiscences, E.E. Hale states that ‘To write the story of “The Man Without a Country” and its sequel, “Philip Nolan’s Friends,” I had to make as careful a study as I could of the history of the acquisition of Louisiana by the United States.’
Edward Everett Hale