Fields (James T.) is born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

James Fields comes to Boston in 1831, goes to work at the by Carter and Hendee bookstore at 3 School Street, and remains when the shop is taken over by James Allen and William Ticknor in 1832. He becomes a partner in Ticknor & Fields Publishers in 1846. Fields marries author and social reformer Annie Adams in 1854,* and moves to a new home at 148 Charles street in 1856,* where the couple host the most noted literary salon in Boston. Barrett Wendell subsequently writes, “So far as Fields was a poet or merely a man of business, he might be dismissed as unimportant. And yet it is doubtful whether any one had greater or better influence on the literature of New England.” Fields dies in Boston on April 24, 1881.