Thomas Wentworth Higginson was an extraordinarily versatile and energetic cultural critic and man of letters in nineteenth-century America. According to Henry James, he reflected almost everything that was in the New England air during his long and frequently tempestuous lifetime. A transcendentalist inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, Higginson wrote extensively on a wide range of cultural issues including literature and criticism, civil rights, women's liberation, the Civil War, temperance, labor reform, and international politics. Aside from Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), Common Sense About Women (1882), and Cheerful Yesterdays (1898), which deserve to be better known than they are, Higginson is chiefly remembered for a substantial body of literary criticism that covered the whole span of American writing, from the colonial period to the turn-of-the-century fiction of Edith Wharton.

Born on 23 December 1823 on "Professor's Row" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Stephen Higginson and Louisa Storrow Higginson, Thomas...