Shy and somewhat reserved, largely because of intermittent deafness, a gracious, bearded, and rotund self-styled "literary workman" who resembled the prototype of the old New England authors he championed, Horace Elisha Scudder not only edited the Riverside Magazine for Young People but also founded the Riverside Literature series of texts for schools and colleges. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell entered the American curriculum through his efforts. He created the Cambridge Poets series, consisting of one-volume editions on major American and British poets. According to Howard Mumford Jones, through this series Scudder "performed one of the most amazing feats in the history of American books." As editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1890 to 1898, Scudder advised, guided, corrected, and cajoled Sarah Orne Jewett, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Henry James. He began as a promoter of juvenile literature; he emerged a prominent...