Griswold, Rufus Wilmot (1815-1857)| US anthologist, editor, and literary critic. He was a strong opponent of Americanism in literature and published an anthology of The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). He succeeded Edgar Allan Poe as editor of Graham's Magazine (1842-43). Among the other literary collections he edited are The Prose Works of John Milton (1845, 1847), The Prose Writers of America (1847), and The Female Poets of America (1848). |
| Griswold was born in Benson, Vermont. 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, among others, he established a library in the New York City Prison. He wrote a rather harsh obituary of Poe (1849), even though Poe had named him as his literary executor. He published a flawed edition of Poe's works (1850-56) and included a scandalous memoir. He edited the International Monthly Magazine (1850-52) and P T Barnum's Illustrated News (1852-53). He wrote a lengthy and remarkably destructive review of the Duykinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature in the New York Herald (February 1856). |
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