The Hartford Wits were a group of young writers from Connecticut in the late 18th century including John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, and Lemuel Hopkins.[1] Originally the Connecticut Wits, the group formed in the late 18th century as a literary society at Yale College and then assumed a new name, the Hartford Wits. Their writings satirized an outmoded curriculum and, more significantly, society and the politics of the mid-1780s.