George Willis Cooke was a Unitarian minister, scholar, and critic, best known for his studies of American transcendentalism. In a larger sense, however, he is noted for explicating the humanistic and social concerns that he identified as the essence of the transcendental movement for a late-nineteenth-century audience. He also used his understanding of those concerns as a critical perspective from which to view various nineteenth-century English authors and even the history of religion. Significantly, Cooke felt it necessary in his An Historical and Biographical Introduction to Accompany the Dial (1902) to deny that he was himself a transcendentalist because he felt himself more scientifically enlightened than members of that group, and yet the idealism and essential humanity that he associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle are consistently the highest criteria he employed in judging the effectiveness of a literary work.

Cooke began his career as a scholar...