The name Donald Grant Mitchell remains virtually unknown today, though at the time of Mitchell's death in 1908 he was one of the most highly regarded American writers of the nineteenth century. If known at all today, he would most likely be recognized by his pseudonym, Ik Marvel. Mitchell's early essays were critical and popular successes, and two of his books, Reveries of a Bachelor: or, A Book of the Heart (1850) and its sequel Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons (1851) were best-sellers at the height of what has come to be known as the American Renaissance. But with the twentieth century came a rapid decline in Mitchell's literary reputation. His writings were generally considered to be overly sentimental, hopelessly middle class, and lacking in the profundity of those of a Herman Melville, a Nathaniel Hawthorne, or a Ralph Waldo Emerson. During the last quarter of the twentieth century...