Towle was born in
Washington, D.C., the son of Nathaniel C. Towle and
Eunice Makepeace Towle. He earned degrees in arts from
Yale University in 1861 and in law from the
Harvard Law School in 1863, and practised in Boston in 1863–65. He was United States
consul at Nantes, France, in 1866–68, and in the latter year was transferred to the consulate at Bradford, England, where he remained until his return to Boston in 1870. One of his many prominent friends was
Charles Dickens, to whose periodical,
All the Year Round, he contributed several articles on American affairs. Towle became president of the Papyrus club in 1880, and was a delegate to the Republican national convention at Chicago in 1888. He was managing editor of the Boston
Commercial Bulletin in 1870–71, and foreign editor of the
Boston Post in 1871–76, and became a contributor to many foreign and American periodicals and took an active part in the literary life publishing over 50 books and articles and giving public lectures on topics of the day. In early 1873 Towle started collaborating with the American publisher
James R. Osgood on translations of Verne. He continued to translate the Verne novels until the bankruptcy of the firm in 1876. The translations are of a uniformly high quality. On September 16, 1866, in Paris, Towle married Nellie Lane of Boston, who survived him. Towle died in Brookline after a long illness culminating in paralysis of the brain, and was buried in
Mount Auburn Cemetery. He had no children. ==Selected works==