The literary career of Edward Weeks covered a wide spectrum: he was an author, lecturer, and influential literary critic. But undoubtedly the most important aspect of his career was that of editor--first at the Atlantic Monthly magazine and then at the book-publishing branch of the company, the Atlantic Monthly Press.

Edward Augustus Weeks's path to editorial prominence was, at the outset, a meandering one. He was born on 19 February 1898 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of Edward Weeks, a cotton factor and merchant who commuted to Manhattan, and Frederica Suydam Weeks. He was a self-confessed slow starter who would later remind the president of Harvard of the inequality of IQ tests and their potential damage to those who bloomed late. Both sides of his family were seventeenth-century arrivals in America, and that tradition seemed to cast a spell of traditional kinship upon him, instilling lasting pride in his...