Gladden’s birth name is var­i­ous­ly re­port­ed as Sol­o­mon Wash­ing­ton Glad­den or George Wash­ing­ton Glad­den, but he later dropped the first name. His fa­ther, a school teach­er, died when Wash­ing­ton was a young boy, and the fam­i­ly moved to New York. He mar­ried Eliz­a­beth Shores in 1852, and en­tered the O­we­go Acad­e­my, Ti­o­ga Coun­ty, New York, in 1855, then Will­iams Coll­ege in 1859. Af­ter work­ing as a news­pa­per re­port­er, he be­came an or­dained min­is­ter in 1860, and pas­tored in Brook­lyn, New York (1860); Mor­ris­ania, New York (1861-66); North Adams, Mass­a­chu­setts (1866-71); Spring­field, Mass­a­chu­setts (1875-82); and Co­lum­bus, Ohio. In Co­lum­bus, he was pa­stor of the First Con­gre­ga­tion­al Church for 32 years. From 1871 to 1875, he was on the ed­it­orial staff of the New York Independent, and later, while pas­tor at Sprintfield, he edited the weekly periodical Sun­day Af­ternoon. 7In 1891, he was a del­e­gate to the in­ter­na­tion­al con­gress of Con­gre­ga­tion­al­ists in Lon­don. He was al­so mod­er­a­tor of the Con­gre­ga­tion­al Church in Amer­i­ca, helped set­tle an an­thra­cite coal strike in 1902, and was known as a so­cial re­form­er. His works in­clude:

• Plain Thoughts on the Art of Liv­ing, 1868
• From the Hub to the Hud­son (Bos­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts: New Eng­land News Co., 1869)
• Work­ing Peo­ple and Their Em­ploy­ers (Bos­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts: Lock­wood, Brooks, and Com­pa­ny, 1876)
• The Young Men and the Church­es, 1885
• Applied Christ­ian­i­ty, 1887
• Who Wrote the Bi­ble?, 1891
• The Church and the King­dom, 1894
• Ruling Ideas of the Pre­sent Age, 1895
• The Christ­ian Pas­tor, 1898
• Social Salva­tion, 1901
• Christ­ianity and So­cial­ism, 1905
• Recollections, 1909