Few figures in American literary history have been so thoroughly vilified as Andrews Norton. A liberal Unitarian polemicist, teacher of a generation of Harvard-trained ministers (including Ralph Waldo Emerson), editor of an important literary magazine, and author of a massive work of biblical scholarship, Norton has long been known by the dismissive epithet Theodore Parker used in his journals--"Pope Andrews"--for his prominent role in the so-called miracles controversy of the late 1830s. For more than a century Norton's infamy remained securely posited against the Transcendentalist writers whom he opposed; as Perry Miller wryly wrote in 1961, the controversy depicted Emerson as "the purest of white" and Norton "as black as the pit." Modern reappraisals, however, reveal Norton to be at once more consistently principled and more humanly complex than his reputation might suggest.

Andrews Norton was born in Hingham, Massachusetts, on 31 December 1786, the youngest child of Samuel...