"My name and all I have done will be forgotten," Samuel Griswold Goodrich wrote in his autobiography, Recollections of a Lifetime. To Americans in the mid 1800s, and especially to children, the prediction would have been astonishing. "I think you have done more to diffuse useful knowledge among the rising generation than any other modern writer, either English or American," President Millard Fillmore wrote to Goodrich in 1850, in reference to Goodrich's series of books for children written under the name Peter Parley. Goodrich, hardworking and productive, said in his memoirs that he had written or edited 116 Parley books and fifty-four others; about seven million volumes had been sold and about three hundred thousand were being sold annually. As late as 1912 five Parley books were still in print. Total sales have been estimated at twelve million.

A champion of American writers in a time when the country was considered...