SOURCE: An introduction to The Connecticut Wits. edited

Title page of The Echo, 1807

Parrington was an American historian, critic, and educator who contributed regularly to such prestigious reference works as Encyclopaedia Britannica and The Cambridge History of American Literature. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the first two volumes of his influential Main Currents in American Thought (1927); the third volume remained unfinished at the time of his death. In this series, Parrington composed, according to Michael O'Brien, "not a study of American literature so much as of American political thought refracted through literature." While his efforts are still widely admired today, many critics contend that his unabashedly liberal bias, and his summary judgments of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and others, compromised his work In the following introduction to his The Connecticut Wits (1926), Parrington assesses the...