George Ticknor was one of Boston's reigning men of letters in the generation immediately preceding that of the Transcendentalists. Ticknor mediated between the more intellectual elements of the New England elite to which he belonged and the renowned representatives of European culture whom he sought out during his first Continental sojourn (1815-1819). His writings were concerned with literary history and with the universities and libraries that make the teaching and study of literary history possible. The History of Spanish Literature (1849), his most substantive work of scholarship, emerged from Ticknor's career as professor of modern languages at Harvard College (1819-1835) and from the bibliographical activities by which he sought to make European literatures available to learned Americans.

Ticknor received a careful education from his parents, Elisha and Elizabeth Billings Curtis Ticknor, who had both been schoolteachers. He attended Dartmouth College and after his graduation, the intellectually precocious but sociable...