John Sullivan Dwight, a Transcendentalist writer and critic on music, literature, and social reform, was founder and sole editor of the first long-lasting nineteenth-century periodical of art music in America, Dwight's Journal of Music, A Paper of Art and Literature. He was a respected translator of German and French literature, teacher of music and Latin at Brook Farm, and effective advocate for the establishment of music in the curriculum at Harvard University and for many cultural organizations in Boston, Massachusetts.

Oldest of the four children of Dr. John Dwight--a Calvinist-turned-freethinker who then became a physician--and Mary (Corey) Dwight, John Sullivan Dwight was born 13 May 1813 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1832. Supplied with fine faculty recommendations in the classics and in German, he expected to obtain a suitable position as a teacher of languages and...