SOURCE: An introduction to The Prose of the Minor Connecticut Wits, Vol. I, by Theodore Dwight, edited by Benjamin Franklin V, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1974, pp. iii-xv.

Franklin is an American educator, editor, and critic. Below, he comments on the breadth and variety of prose pieces composed by the major and minor Connecticut Wits.

It is the custom for each new appreciator of the Connecticut Wits to acknowledge that group's important place in the history of American letters and then lament that their books, some of which were among the most ambitious of their day, rest neglected on library shelves with two centuries of accumulated dust as coverlets. In the middle years of this century the Wits have been ignored because of the dominance of the useful but limited new criticism, because of a widely held but generally unchallenged belief that little of literary merit was written in this...