RUFUS WILMOT GRISWOLDJoy Bayless Vanderbilt University Press ($3.50).
When he was 27, Rufus Griswold became associate editor of The Saturday Evening Post and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia. That was in 1842. Graham's, with a circulation of 40,000huge for that periodmade money. Griswold's salary was $1,000 a year, his work tempestuous; his stay there brief.
Intense, ambitious, handsome, emotional, able, fluent, glib and graceful, Rufus Griswold had left his Vermont home and wandered from town to town as a printer, became a protege of Horace Greeley, got into politics briefly, edited the...