Wood's other biographies for young adults have also been praised by critics as interesting and intelligent studies of some of America's best writers. Many of Wood's subjects are eighteenth-century writers, and when read as a group these biographies provide an insightful portrait of the social and literary life of that century. Wood enthusiastically endorses the individualism of Henry David Thoreau in A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle-Dove, as he does that of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Trust Thyself. He is equally effective in his study of the enigmatic poet Emily Dickinson. These books, along with his studies of Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, and Washington Irving, also provide good supplementary reading for adults.