One of the healing outcomes of the American Civil War was a renewed and deepening interest in the nation's literature. That interest, quickened by the centennial enthusiasm that was building toward 1876, was also being felt for the first time within the academy. Moses Coit Tyler, at the University of Michigan, found himself writing against the centennial deadline to finish the first scholarly history of American literature. He realized, however, that his scope was too ambitious, and (missing the deadline by two years) contented himself with a two-volume history of the colonial writers. Several years passed before Charles Francis Richardson of Dartmouth College, emboldened by Tyler's pioneering work, set out to write that first large-scale literary history of America. Richardson's treatment within and beyond Tyler's colonial period was different in conception and, by comparison with Tyler, notably drab in spirit and style. Even so, it is indispensable to any...