Selected Letters of Bayard Taylor

This book consists of 275 letters drawn from a corpus of about four thousand. The author has omitted many of the early letters and many of those to Bayard Taylor's close family, which are sufficiently represented in Mrs. Taylor's Life and Letters (1890). Only the most interesting and informative of the letters have been selected - those to his close friends, as well as to famous persons of Taylor's time: people like Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Lowell, Lincoln, Longfellow, Cameron, and President Hayes.

The letters reveal much about mid-nineteenth-century American life and the difficulties a writer faced in earning a living. Many of the letters deal with literary matters, comments on Taylor's and other persons' verse and fiction, advice to friends on improving their work, information on the size of editions and income from his writing, and gossip about events at the New York Tribune, which employed him for most of his career.

Taylor was one of the most famous persons of his day and carried on a wide correspondence. His ambition and thirst for fame are recurrent themes in these letters, as well as his fears and uncertainties. He emerges as a highly talented writer who succeeded by force of will.