Books: Poet's Prophecy

RUFUS WILMOT GRISWOLD—Joy 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 40,000—huge for that period—made 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...

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