author
Henry Seidel Canby
1878–1961
A lively champion of American literature, he helped bring serious books and ideas to a broad public through teaching, editing, and criticism. Best known as a founder of The Saturday Review of Literature, he spent decades connecting scholarship with everyday readers.
3 Audiobooks
Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories
by Elizabeth Ashe, Henry Seidel Canby, Cornelia A. P. (Cornelia Atwood Pratt) Comer, Charles Caldwell Dobie, Madeleine Z. (Madeleine Zabriskie) Doty, H. G. (Harrison Griswold) Dwight, John Galsworthy, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Katharine Butler Hathaway, Zephine Humphrey, Mary Lerner, F. J. Louriet, E. V. (Edward Verrall) Lucas, Margaret Lynn, C. A. Mercer, Margaret Prescott Montague, E. (Edith) Nesbit, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Dallas Lore Sharp, Margaret Pollock Sherwood, Ernest Starr, Amy Wentworth Stone, Arthur Russell Taylor
![Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]](https://listenly.io/api/img/6638c6fd972dc5c80ef75836/cover.jpg)
Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism [First Series]
by Henry Seidel Canby
Everyday Americans
by Henry Seidel Canby
About the author
Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1878, Henry Seidel Canby studied at Yale and later taught there for more than two decades. He became known as a literary critic and professor who believed literature should not stay locked inside the classroom, but should be part of wider public life.
In the 1920s he moved from university teaching into influential editorial work. He edited the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post and then helped found The Saturday Review of Literature, where he became one of the best-known voices introducing books, writers, and literary debates to general readers.
Canby also wrote biographies, criticism, and books on American culture, including studies of major authors such as Walt Whitman and Thoreau. He died in 1961, remembered as an important bridge between academic literary study and the common reader.