Rufus Wilmot Griswold

Anthologist, editor, and literary critic, born in Benson, Vermont, USA. After an obscure period of journalism and editorial work beginning in 1830, he obtained a license as a Baptist minister, though he seems never to have taken a regular pulpit. He edited various periodicals and campaigned against capital punishment and imprisonment for debt. With William Leggett and others, he established a library in the New York City Prison. He was a strong opponent of Americanism in literature and published an anthology of The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). As successor to Edgar Allan Poe as editor of Graham's Magazine (1842–3), he edited additional literary collections, including The Prose Works of John Milton (1845, 1847), The Prose Writers of America (1847), and The Female Poets of America (1848). He wrote a rather harsh obituary of Poe (1849), even though Poe had named him as his literary executor, and published a flawed edition of Poe's works (1850–6), includeing a rather scandalous memoir. He was editor of International Monthly Magazine (1850–2) and P T Barnum's Illustrated News (1852–3), and wrote a lengthy and remarkably destructive review of the Duykinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature in the New York Herald (Feb 1856).

Rufus Wilmot Griswold (February 15, 1815 - August 12, 1857) was an American anthologist, editor and critic, famous for his enmity with Edgar Allan Poe.

Born in Benson, Vermont, he travelled extensively, worked in newspaper offices, was a Baptist clergyman for a time, and finally became a journalist in New York City, where he was successively a member of the staffs of The Brother Jonathan, The New World (1839-1840) and The New Yorker (1840). From 1850 to 1852 he edited the International Magazine (New York), which in 1852 was merged into Harper's Magazine.

He was a compiler and editor of various anthologies (with brief biographies and critiques), such as Poets and Poetry of America (1842), his most popular and valuable book;

He edited the first American edition of Milton's prose works (1845), and, claiming to be literary executor, edited, with James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Parker Willis, the posthumous works (1850) of Edgar Allan Poe.

See Passages from the Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold (Cambridge, Mass., 1898), edited by his son William McCrillis Griswold (1853-1899).