George Cabot Lodge--whose friends included Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Edith Wharton--lived and worked in the center of the most prominent literary and political circles of his time. "Of all the men with whom I have been intimately thrown he was the man to whom I would apply the rare name of genius," Roosevelt wrote of Lodge in his preface to Lodge's collected works. One of his closest friends was Joseph Trumbull Stickney, for whom he acted as literary executor. Because of their common university background, they became known, along with George Santayana and William Vaughn Moody, as the Harvard Poets.

George Cabot Lodge was born on 10 October 1873, the first son of Anna Cabot Mills Lodge and Henry Cabot Lodge, members of one of the most prominent of Boston families, who had descended through a long line of successful merchant sea captains. After...