|
|
Article: The Swamp Root Chronicle: Adventures in the Word Trade.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- January 18, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
THE SWAMP ROOT CHRONICLE: Adventures in the Word Trade. By Robert Manning. Norton. 431 pp. $24.95.
The saddest part about Manning's trials is that they need not have happened.
When Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes wined and dined themselves at successive marathon dinner parties at Boston's Parker House in 1857,.they decided "by the time the wine had run out and the brandy supply was dwindling on the second day" that what this country needed was a new magazine, devoted to literature, art and politics. Holmes came up with the name--The Atlantic Monthly--and "Lowell, the poet-scholar of ...