Lewis Gaylord Clark earned a significant place in American literary criticism by editing the Knickerbocker Magazine, or New York Monthly from 1834 to 1861. During this crucial period in the development of American literature, it was an achievement in itself to sustain a serious periodical that paid contributors for original papers despite the lack of international copyright legislation. Clark exerted the multiple influences of a strong editor and hardworking journalist: he shaped the literary careers of those whose work he chose to print; he influenced readers through his own reviews and those he assigned; and he contributed directly to the development of taste in his brief essays on writers and contemporary literary life and his humorous and touching anecdotes and clever parodies.

While he did not pause, in a life of literary labor, to elaborate a theory of literary criticism, his interests and principles emerge from a study of his...