Most of the letters, which are of prime importance in America's cultural history, have never before been published. The remainder that have appeared in print frequently did so in emasculated form and in a wide variety of books and journals. Here, scrupulous annotations supply relevant identifications of individuals, explain allusions, and present information regarding the addresses of letters, endorsements, postmarks, and the location of manuscripts.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist: “A stunning work of biography” about three little-known New England women who made intellectual history (The New York Times). Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways the American Brontës. The story of these remarkable sisters—and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day—has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall’s monumental biography brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life. Elizabeth Peabody, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire influence on the great writers of the era—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them—who also published some of their earliest works; it was she who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson’s individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Middle sister Mary Peabody was a passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. And the frail Sophia, an admired painter among the preeminent society artists of the day, married Nathaniel Hawthorne—but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray. Casting new light on a legendary American era, and on three sisters who made an indelible mark on history, Marshall’s unprecedented research uncovers thousands of never-before-seen letters as well as other previously unmined original sources. “A massive enterprise,” The Peabody Sisters is an event in American biography (The New York Times Book Review). “Marshall’s book is a grand story . . . where male and female minds and sensibilities were in free, fruitful communion, even if men could exploit this cultural richness far more easily than women.” —The Washington Post “Marshall has greatly increased our understanding of these women and their times in one of the best literary biographies to come along in years.” —New England Quarterly

The Puliter-Prize winning classic and national bestseller returns!Emeritus Harvard Professor David Herbert Donald traces Sumner's life in this Pulitzer-Prize winning classic about a nation careening toward Civil War.

Industry and the Creative Mind takes a radically new look at the figure of the eccentric, alienated writer in American literature and entertainment from 1790 to 1860. Traditional scholarship takes for granted that the eccentric writer, modeled by such Romantic beings as Lord Byron and brought to life for American audiences by the gloomy person of Edgar Allan Poe, was a figure of rebellion against the excesses of modern commercial culture and industrial life. By contrast, Industry and the Creative Mind argues that in the United States myths of writerly moodiness, alienation, and irresponsibility predated the development of a commercial arts and entertainment industry and instead of forming a site of rebellion from this industry formed a bedrock for its development. Looking at the careers of a number of early American writers---Joseph Dennie, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Edgar Allan Poe, Fanny Fern, as well as a host of now forgotten souls who peopled the twilight worlds of hack fiction and industrial literature---this book traces the way in which early nineteenth-century American arts and entertainment systems incorporated writerly eccentricity in their "logical" economic workings, placing the mad, rebellious writer at the center of the industry's productivity and success.

William Longfellow, son of William Langfellow, was born in 1650 in Horsforth near Leeds, Yorkshire, England. He emigrated in about 1673 and settled in Newbury, Massachusetts. He married Anne Sewall 10 November 1678. They had five children. William died while on an expedition to Quebec with Sir William Phipps in 1790. Ancestors, descendants and relatives lived mainly in England, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

A look at the beloved American poet’s home and family, and a glimpse at the early years of Portland, Maine. When a former Revolutionary War general named Peleg Wadsworth finished building a two-story brick house on Congress Street in 1786, the “province of Maine” was still considered part of Massachusetts, and he could see the Fore River from his front door. The city would grow up around the structure, as the Wadsworth-Longfellow family flourished and made history within its walls—and in the fabric of young America’s culture and government. Peleg’s daughter, Zilpah, married Stephen Longfellow IV on the first floor, and they raised their eight children in the home with love and high standards. Their second-eldest son, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote his first childhood poem there before going on to pen great classics including “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Evangeline. Young Henry also watched his father help craft the Maine Constitution, and experienced revolutionary ideals of his home city. This book takes you inside the historic Longfellow House—and lets you explore the city that shaped a renowned American poet. Includes photos and illustrations