Word: griswold
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Intense, ambitious, handsome, emotional, able, fluent, glib and graceful, Rufus Griswold had left his Vermont home and wandered from town to town as a printer, became a protege of Horace Greeley, got into politics briefly, edited the New-Yorker and other gaslight scandal sheets of the 1830s, married happily and became one of the zealots who insisted that American literature could be emancipated from its subservience to England. He also became a Baptist minister, though he never had a church. His anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America, went through 16 editions in his lifetime...
...made each book, and each review of each book, a matter of strategy, vigilance, scandal. One was the recognition by America that its literature was good. The experience was like the sudden awakening of an ex-slave to the knowledge of his freedom, his worth and his inheritance. Griswold's anthology contained Longfellow, Bryant, Poe, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier. (Griswold slighted the South...
...that had not yet reached the stage of battle. The third was not entirely distinct: it was the literary and political rivalry with England that grew with the increasing self-confidence of America. All the conflicts were tense and some of them were bitter. In this stormy period, Rufus Griswold made...
Time and Death. He crashed on the rocks of the journalist's life. His wife died, and Griswold, suffering from tuberculosis, broke down. His collapse was like the literal living-cut of one of Poe's stories. In his derangement Griswold went to his wife's tomb, unfastened the coffin lid, "turned aside the drapery that hid her face," and seeing "the terrible changes made by Death and Time," fell uncon scious, to be found the next day by a friend...
...modern literary figure combines Griswold's prominence, his position as a cultural master of ceremonies, and his un steady, enigmatic personal life. His second marriage was to a wealthy spinster of Charleston, S.C. He was 30. She was 13 years older, living with two spinster aunts. The women believed that Griswold and his two daughters had a fortune of $50,000. They did not. Griswold on his part dreamed of a winter home in the temperate South. "On his wedding night the bridegroom learned that . . . the woman who bore his name was, through some physical misfortune, incapable of being...