biography
| name: |
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1815–57)
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| biography:
| Anthologist, editor, and literary critic, born in Benson, Vermont, USA. After an obscure period of journalism and editorial work beginning in 1830, he obtained a license as a Baptist minister, though he seems never to have taken a regular pulpit. He edited various periodicals and campaigned against capital punishment and imprisonment for debt. With William Leggett and others, he established a library in the New York City Prison. He was a strong opponent of Americanism in literature and published an anthology of The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). As successor to Edgar Allan Poe as editor of Graham's Magazine (1842–3), he edited additional literary collections, including The Prose Works of John Milton (1845, 1847), The Prose Writers of America (1847), and The Female Poets of America (1848). He wrote a rather harsh obituary of Poe (1849), even though Poe had named him as his literary executor, and published a flawed edition of Poe's works (1850–6), includeing a rather scandalous memoir. He was editor of International Monthly Magazine (1850–2) and P T Barnum's Illustrated News (1852–3), and wrote a lengthy and remarkably destructive review of the Duykinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature in the New York Herald (Feb 1856). |
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