This is the first full-length biography of Horatio Greenough. Aside from a short fifty page account published in 1853, no one up to now has attempted to write the complete story of his life.

Greenough, who lived from 1805 to 1852, was the first American to devote himself from the outset of his career to the profession of sculpture and the first to set forth at any length the concept of functionalism in architecture. He was generally forgotten after his death, chiefly because the heroic, classical tradition in sculpture to which he was committed gave place to the realistic depiction...

This is a study of the effect of their travels in Italy on thirteen American writers, among them Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W. D. Howells, and Henry James. Nathalia Wright's thesis is that Italy was a major influence on the American writers of fiction who visited that country. Some of these writers went to Italy for reasons of health. others because they were dissatisfied with the status of artists in the United States and wished the pleasure and adventure of living in a country permeated with artistic sensibility. They all had in common a love for the...