George William Curtis (24 February 1824-31 August 1892), critic and social commentator, was born at Providence, Rhode Island. After failing the entrance examination for Brown University in 1838, Curtis worked in a New York importing house but soon tired of it. What he really wanted to try was literature. Curtis looked towards the Brook Farm community as holding out the best hope for his future; there he planned both to earn a living and to pursue his literary interests. He and his brother Burrill arrived at Brook Farm in May 1842. Although he was able to write, publishing poems in the Transcendentalists' periodical, the Dial, and in the Brook Farm's Harbinger, Curtis tired of life at the community. Put off by "a selfish and an unheroic aspect" he saw in the Brook Farmers' lives, Curtis left for New York in 1843. The next year he joined Burrill to live in Concord, where he...