Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by Nicholas Basbanes book review
When I was growing up, there were four junior high schools in my hometown: Hawthorne, Whittier, Irving and Longfellow. They were all built in the 1920s and named in honor of what were then America’s most respected, and respectable, 19th-century writers. Forty years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow still featured prominently in the school system’s English classes. To speak just of poetry, my classmates and I read “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” “The Village Blacksmith” and even the book-length “Evangeline.
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