SOURCE: Introduction to The Story of Kennett, by Bayard Taylor, College & University Press, 1973, pp. 7-21.

In the following introduction to Taylor's The Story of Kennett, La Salle offers an overview of Taylor's career and provides background for the novel.

One hundred years ago, few serious readers in America would have thought it possible that Bayard Taylor would someday be an almost forgotten author, for he was one of the better-known writers of his period. Taylor's fate serves to remind us that two very different literatures were being written in the 1850's and 1860's. Among Taylor's contemporaries were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman; but from another angle, the literary life was dominated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The general devaluation of the “Genteel writers” of New England has consigned to obscurity such members of that...