Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, himself a pillar of American letters and intimate friend to the inner circles of New England transcendentalism, offers here an intimate portrait of the poet who became America's first truly global literary star. Written just seven years after Longfellow's death in 1882, this biography carries the weight of personal recollection alongside critical distance. Higginson traces Longfellow's journey from Portland, Maine, childhood through his formative years at Bowdoin College, his transformative European studies, and his decades at Harvard, painting a man whose ambition was nothing less than to forge a distinctly American literature from the raw material of European forms. The biography illuminates Longfellow's profound influence, his democratizing vision that welcomed voices Black and white, male and female into the literary conversation, and his patient craft that produced verses so musical they seemed to write themselves. Yet Higginson does not flinch from the tragedies that shadowed Longfellow's life: the death of his first wife Mary in 1835, the devastating fire that claimed his second wife Frances in 1861, and the long years of grief that followed. This is both a critical assessment and a memorial, written by one who knew the man and understood his era's literary battles.