The assessment of Thomas Dunn English's career has changed significantly from the period of his greatest productivity, to the time of his death, to the present day. Modern students remember English, if at all, as an editor of failed journals and the unsuccessful defendant in a libel suit initiated by Edgar Allan Poe. Toward the end of his life, however, he was appreciated as an indefatigable poet, novelist, and dramatist. English's son-in-law, Arthur Howard Noll, in an essay that won a prize from The Midland Monthly for Best Original Descriptive Paper in 1897, extolled the "vast amount of literary work accomplished by [English] in an extraordinarily long and busy career." His obituary in The New York Times of 2 April 1902 echoes the same sentiment.

Born near Philadelphia on 29 June 1819 English was of Norman-Irish Quaker ancestry, with the Norman surname "Angelos" anglicized at some point to "English." His family immigrated to...