American editor, descendant of John Alden, born at Mt. Tabor, VT, on the 11th of November 1836. After graduating from Williams College (1857), under the régime of Mark Hopkins, he completed the course at the Andover Theological Seminary (1860); but he never took orders. He first contributed to the Atlantic Monthly two essays on “The Eleusinia” (1859–60), and then a paper on “Pericles and President Lincoln” (1863). These fruits of his classical studies show the influence of De Quincey, who was the subject of another essay in the Atlantic (1863). He delivered twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston, 1863–4, on “The Structure of Paganism.” He was managing editor of Harper’s Weekly from 1863 to 1869, and then became editor of Harper’s Magazine, which position he held until his death in New York on the 6th of October 1919.
He was author of God in His World (1890); A Study of Death (1895) and Magazine Writing and the New Literature (1908).
