Charles Eliot Norton

Charles Eliot Norton (November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908) was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. He was from the same notable Eliot family as the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who made his career in the United Kingdom. Early life Norton was born in 1827 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Andrews Norton (1786–1853), was a Unitarian theologian, and Dexter professor of sacred literature at Harvard; his mother was Catherine Eliot, a daughter of the merchant Samuel Eliot. Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, was his cousin. Norton graduated from Harvard in 1846, where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding, and started in business with an East Indian trading firm in Boston, traveling to India in 1849. After a tour in Europe, where he was influenced by John Ruskin and pre-Raphaelite painters, he returned to Boston in 1851, and devoted himself to literature and art. He translated Dante's Vita Nuova (1860 and 1867) and the Divina Commedia (1891-91-92, 3 vols, 1902 being the publication year of Norton's thorough final edit). He worked tirelessly as secretary to the Loyal Publication Society during the Civil War, communicating with newspaper editors across the country. These included journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison, who became a lifelong friend.