Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury was one of the first American scholars to enter the field of literary history. His studies of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and James Fenimore Cooper were important advances in the knowledge of these writers and their times. His pioneering history of the English language was for many years the standard introduction to the subject, and he made valuable contributions to the swelling debate at the turn of the century over the vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling of the English language in America. And Lounsbury was unquestionably a major formative influence in the development of English as an independent academic discipline in American schools and colleges.

He was born in Ovid, New York, the son of the Reverend Thomas Lounsbury, a Presbyterian minister of strongly abolitionist sentiments who was the author of Pro-Slavery Overthrown (1847). His mother, Mary Janette Woodward Lounsbury, was the daughter...