Edwin Percy Whipple's literary criticism received wide acclaim before he was thirty-five. During the 1840s and early 1850s he contributed articles to many periodicals, including the North American Review, Graham's Magazine, the American Review, the Literary World, and the Methodist Quarterly Review. In 1847, when Whipple was twentyeight, Rufus Griswold, introducing the selections from Whipple's work which appeared in The Prose Writers of America (1847), judged that he gave "promise of occupying a higher rank than has been attained by any other American" among critical essayists. After Whipple published a collection of articles as the two-volume Essays and Reviews in 1848, the Literary World (23 December 1848) asserted that he now was "generally reputed to stand at the head of American critics," and the Christian Review (April 1850) announced that he was "considered on all hands the most accomplished" of contemporary critical essayists and lecturers. Emerson considered Whipple "a superior critics"; Hawthorne regarded him...