William Alfred Jones made significant and influential contributions to American critical thought and practice in the years from 1835 to 1850. Edgar Allan Poe, in an 1850 article, "About Critics and Criticism" in Graham's Magazine, reflects the judgment of many of his time, calling Jones "Our most analytic, if not altogether our best critic, (Mr. Whipple, perhaps, excepted)...." If conservative New Englander Edwin Percy Whipple was "our young American Macaulay," in a popular label of the period, liberal New Yorker Jones was our young American Hazlitt. The life of William A. Jones represents--for a brief time-a new group in American intellectual life, the professional literary critics who had arisen to analyze, interpret, and judge the productions of an equally new group, the professional authors. He is the best critic and theorist of the Young Americans associated with Evert Duyekinck in New York, who were actively advocating a distinctively democratic American literature...