An outspoken Virginia-born abolitionist, Moncure Daniel Conway was an editor of antislavery periodicals, a radical religious thinker, and a biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. During his varied life, Conway moved easily within intellectual circles on both sides of the Atlantic, counting as friends several well-known nineteenth-century figures--including Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Carlyle, William Dean Howells, John Stuart Mill, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Helen Hunt Jackson. Conway was a tireless essayist and critic who raised European awareness of many American writers, among them Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. An opponent of orthodoxy in all its forms, Conway was a lifelong proponent of free thought, social justice, and racial and gender equality.

Born on 17 March 1832 near Falmouth, Stafford County, Virginia, Conway was the second son of a respected plantation family whose American ancestry stretched back to 1640. His father, Walker Peyton Conway (1805-1884), a county...