From January 1881 until September 1906 Jeannette Gilder edited the Critic, one of America's more influential literary magazines. She and her brother Joseph began the project in a tiny second-story office at New York City's Eighth Street and Broadway and shared editorial duties until 1901, when Joseph retired to take a position as a London representative of a major publishing house. Though the Critic's circulation was never much above five thousand, it became highly respected for its incisive reviews of literature, music, and drama, and for its publication of essays, poetry, and fiction by some of America's most talented writers, such as Walt Whitman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Joel Chandler Harris. In fact, when the magazine was merged with Putnam's Monthly in 1906, Putnam's noted that "the list of its contributors during the quarter century of its existence includes the best known names of recent ... literature." Its achievement was due...