Put to music, the words morphed into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which became the official national anthem in 1931. M’Henry”-contained lines that have melded into the fabric of American life. The poem that thirty-five-year-old Francis Scott Key wrote that night-initially titled “The Defence of Ft. That night a massive British f leet of warships tried to pound the city into submission with a constant stream of bomb, mortar, and rocket shells as an intense thunderstorm punctuated the darkness.

The giant exception was the patriotic poem he wrote on the fateful night of September 13–14, 1814, during one of the War of 1812’s most ferocious and crucial engagements, the Battle of Baltimore. Verses that their author never meant to be seen or read outside the circle of his family and friends. From the time he was a child, he spun out rhyming verses with prolific regularity, verses that with one giant exception were at best overly f lowery and at worst embarrassingly amateurish. “From the moment he arose” to speak at a trial in 1811, one courtroom observer wrote, “the crowd was brought back from the doors and every adjoining part of the house,” drawn by his “peculiar celebrity. The well-connected, highly successful Washington, D.C., lawyer-the scion of an aristocratic Maryland family-was known throughout the early American Republic for his multifaceted oratorical skills: in the courtroom in front of patriotic, religious, and political gatherings and in the salonlike atmosphere of his finely appointed Georgetown home. Book Excerpt: 'What So Proudly We Hailed' We revisit a conversation Here & Now's Robin Young had with Leepson ( in July 2014. Historian Marc Leepson's book, ' What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life,' tells Key's story.

But after he penned the now-famous lyrics, he hardly mentioned them during his life. (Danny_Eugene/Flickr) This article is more than 5 years old.įrancis Scott Key is most famous for writing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' after the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812. Francis Scott Key was inspired to pen 'Star Spangled Banner' after witnessing the battle. An American flag with 15 stars still flies over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, the site of the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812.

Listen to the star spangled banner song