Larzer Ziff perhaps best expressed the place Arlin Turner holds in American literary scholarship when he identified him as "one of the senators of [that] congregation of scholars ... who reconstructed the lives of American authors, established their texts, and offered what came to be regarded as the standard readings of them, readings which serve today's critics as points of departure and opposition." Ziff calls Turner's biography of George Washington Cable "the model of recovery of a minor literary figure," and Terence Martin has pronounced his Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (1980) "definitive." In addition, from 1954 to 1979 Turner served the principal scholarly journal in the field of American literary studies, American Literature, either as managing editor or as editor. It was during this twenty-five-year period that the fields of American studies in general and of American literary studies in particular became legitimate and recognized academic disciplines. Turner's contribution to that success...