Joseph Dennie--editor, literary critic, and essayist--was a pioneer litterateur in America in the Federalist period. As a professional man of letters, he was preceded only by Charles Brockden Brown. He was the first American editor to attempt a department of literary criticism in a periodical; in criticism, his was the most insistent voice for classical propriety and taste in letters. He was the first American to conduct a domestic literary magazine which enjoyed a widespread national circulation and patronage. Often called the "American Addison," he was the country's foremost serial essayist after Benjamin Franklin and was the precursor of such other writers in this genre as Washington Irving and William Wirt. He was overpraised by Timothy Dwight as "the Father of Belles-Lettres" in America, but few critics, if any, stimulated more interest than he in polite literature in the formative years of the new republic.

Dennie was born...