When Parke Godwin is remembered at all today, it seems to be chiefly for the fact of his having been the son-in-law of the admired and popular nineteenth-century American poet and journalist, William Cullen Bryant. Godwin's career as a reformer and a journalist, however, spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century, and it brought him into contact with most of the leading figures of the time, including such writers as Washington Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson, such important journalists as Orestes Brownson of the Democratic Review and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, and such notable social reformers as George Ripley and William Henry Channing, both of whom were leading inspirational forces at Brook Farm, the utopian West Roxbury, Massachusetts, community. After the Civil War until the time of his death, Godwin maintained a central position in the difficult and competitive journalistic world of New York...