This 1906 collection of essays by a noted American educator and lecturer covers the lives, works, and character of nineteen authors—including Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Francis Parkman, and Walt Whitman. This was a break-out work because it was the first of its kind to prominently feature American writers publishing after 1789.