Charles Frederick Briggs (30 December 1804-20 June 1877), New York novelist and editor, was born in Siasconset, Nantucket. Like many Americans who chose to come to the metropolis in early adulthood, he became a devoted New Yorker, bringing the self-sufficiency and the common sense cultivated on his native island to his adopted home. Despite his public identification with city life, best illustrated in his 1856 service as a member of the Olmstead planning committee for Central Park, Briggs claimed that Nantucket was the source of his values. Perhaps the energy for his fiction came from the tension between an idealized memory of Nantucket simplicity and the lively reality of New York confusion and chicanery. Briggs spent his adult life in the struggle to build an American literature; this commitment kept him close to the corner of Ann and Nassau Streets, journalists' row in lower Manhattan, but he made his home on...