One of the most remarkable young men of his day, Elihu Hubbard Smith, in the short twenty-seven years of his life, became a second-generation member of the Connecticut Wits (the first American "school" of poets), editor of the first book-length anthology of American poetry, writer of perhaps the first American comic opera, a biographer, a leading medical figure, and, finally, a martyr to his profession. In the twentieth century Smith has become one of the most written about minor figures in the history of American letters.

Smith was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, to Dr. Reuben Smith and Abigail Hubbard Smith, and, after undergoing tutoring, he entered Yale College at the age of eleven. He took his B.A. degree in 1786--Yale's youngest graduate to that time--with his traditional Christian faith profoundly shaken by freethinking friends and deistical readings. He joined the literary society Brothers in Unity (which had...