ABSTRACT
James Russell Lowell was one of nineteenth-century America's most revered men of letters. He is best remembered today as the author of The Biglow Papers, one of the first major literary works to employ American vernacular speech. The Lowells were well-respected figures among New England's social and intellectual elite. The lectures established him as a major literary critic, and he was offered the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard College, where he replaced the retiring Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. An impassioned critic of the war and slavery who wrote in the native idiom of the New England countryside, The Biglow Papers was alternately ironic, humorous, and acerbic. Lowell's fame, which extended to Europe as well as America, rested as much on his literary criticism as on his poetry. In 1844, Lowell became a regular editorialist for the Pennsylvania Freeman; in 1848, he contributed a weekly column to the National Anti-Slavery Standard.
