Despite new scholarly interests in the history of authorship, publishing, popular literatures, and uncanonized writers in the United States, Park Benjamin remains nearly forgotten. A prolific poet and influential editor of literary periodicals in Boston and New York in the 1840s, he failed to secure a place of lasting importance among his contemporaries. Perhaps this failure occurred because he never published a book of his own, devoting himself almost exclusively to editing and writing for periodicals. As some of his contemporaries feared, most notably Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, ephemeral literary journals were no basis for lasting literary fame. Benjamin's career went virtually unnoticed after his death until 1948, when Merle M. Hoover published a biography and selected edition of Benjamin's poetry. Earlier, in A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (1930), Frank Luther Mott considered Benjamin's major editorial assignments in context, and in 1971 Lillian B. Gilkes published two lengthy...