SOURCE: “James Russell Lowell,” in Fifteen American Authors Before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism, edited by Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert, University of Wisconsin Press, 1971, pp. 285-305.

In the following excerpt, Rees surveys biographical and critical assessments of Lowell, noting “that the definitive study of Lowell has not yet been written.”

Biography

Though Lowell is extensively discussed in literary histories and critical works and though he is mentioned in biographies of other great men of his time, there are relatively few biographies of Lowell. Of these only two qualify as full-scale historical biographies: Horace Scudder's James Russell Lowell: A Biography and Martin Duberman's James Russell Lowell.

Scudder's book was preceded by such works as Francis H. Underwood's The Poet and the Man: Recollections and Appreciations of James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1892) and Edward Everett Hale, Jr.'s James Russell Lowell and His Friends (Boston, 1899). Written shortly...