Ellery Sedgwick, the eighth editor of the Atlantic Monthly, built that magazine into a social and political force. During his twenty-nine-year editorship the magazine's circulation increased from 10,000 to 125,000; it published works by such writers as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost; it championed many liberal causes, among them the League of Nations; it questioned the justice of the Sacco and Vanzetti case; and, in its coverage of the controversy over the presidential candidacy of Alfred E. Smith, it challenged religious bigotry.

Sedgwick was born in New York City on 27 February 1872 to Henrietta Ellery and Henry Dwight Sedgwick, an attorney. His family roots were in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As a boy he attended a private boarding school, then the Groton School, from which he graduated in 1890. After obtaining his A.B. at Harvard in 1894, Sedgwick returned to Groton to teach Latin and English from 1894 to 1896. After a brief stint as a...