Evert A. Duyckinck was the most important American literary critic in New York during the two decades before the Civil War. He was a principal figure in the Young America movement of literary nationalists in the 1840s, the chief editor for Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books (1845-1848), the founder of the weekly Literary World (1847-1853), a major literary diarist and correspondent, the principal compiler of the landmark Cyclopædia of American Literature (1855), and the donor of a major founding collection of books to the New York Public Library. Best known for his friendship with and influence upon Herman Melville, Duyckinck was also a significant figure in the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and, to a lesser degree, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Washington Irving.

Although Duyckinck's periodical publications were frequently a mixture of...