Volumes III and IV of this edition bring together all the extant letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for the period 1844-1865, most of which have never before been published. These letters carry Longfellow through the remarkable period when he was gaining renown both at home and abroad as the poet laureate of America. His influence swelled with the publication of such works as Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Part One of Tales of a Wayside Inn. During these twenty-two years his correspondence proliferated, reaching at least 4000 letters, of which 1500 are known to have survived and are reproduced in these two volumes.

The letters offer further insight not only into the poet's personal life but into his time as well. They document the manifold burdens placed on a popular man of letters, from responding to pleas for advice from unpublished poets to dealing with critical attacks on his own poetry to warding off the importunities of scores of admirers.

The letters further reveal a political interest not hitherto suspected in Longfellow. His exchanges with Senator Charles Sumner shed light on the political dramas of the day, including presidential elections, the Mexican War, the slavery controversy, the founding of the Republican party, and the Civil War. From a social viewpoint, the letters provide an absorbing account of the settled and elegant life of a member of the Boston-Cambridge upper class, into which Longfellow had moved with his marriage to Frances Appleton. They also reveal him as a warm-hearted family man, devoted to his wife and children and solicitous for the welfare of an unhappy brother, a widowed sister, and two wayward nephews.

The letters of Volume III span the publication of five volumes of verse, three anthologies, and a novel. They document the numerous private events that vied with literary production for Longfellow's attention, such as the birth of his six children and the complicated summer migrations to Nahant or Newport. They also follow Longfellow through his resignation from the liaryard professorship in 1854, which was prompted by a desire to devote himself more fully to writing.

Andrew Hilen, who is author of Longfellow and Scandinavia and Professor of English at the University of Washington, has included numerous contemporary photographs to illustrate the letters. His scrupulous annotations supply relevant identifications of individuals, explain allusions, and provide information regarding the addresses of letters, endorsements, postmarks, and the location of manuscripts.

These final volumes of Andrew Hilen's admired edition bring together the extant Longfellow letters of 1866–1882, most of which have never before been published. During this period Longfellow's reputation reached its zenith; no American poet before or since has enjoyed a popular following more varied or numerous. Here we see him expanding his already enormous influence with the publication of Poems of Places, a poetic translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, and other works. The letters reveal him as a hard-working writer and editor, as an astute businessman who nevertheless gave freely of his gains to friends and causes, and as an often lonely and struggling individual.

They provide, as well, a view of Longfellow's world—the American literary scene, the publishing business, academic life, politics, religion, and the Reconstruction period. Hilen includes in Volume VI a comprehensive index for the entire six-volume edition, which represents a social document of the times.

Volumes I and II of this projected multi-volume edition bring together for the first time all the extant letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for the period 1814–1843. Most of the letters, which are of prime importance in America’s cultural history, have never before been published. The remainder that have appeared in print frequently did so in emasculated form and in a wide variety of books and journals. In addition to restoring the complete texts of this correspondence, editor Andrew Hilen has provided a distinguished General Introduction in Volume I and prefatory comments at the head of Parts I–IV of the two volumes. Scrupulous annotations supply relevant identifications of individuals, explain allusions, and present information regarding the addresses of letters, endorsements, postmarks, and the location of manuscripts.

Readers of the letters of this period will follow Longfellow through his career at Bowdoin College, both as an undergraduate and as a professor, on his lengthy sojourns in Europe, and through his first years as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. They offer a wealth of material that is available nowhere else on many of the leading issues of his day, on its literary and scholarly scene, and most important, on the development of the poet himself. Longfellow emerges from these pages as far more than the mild and studied figure that tradition has made of him.