Norton, Charles Eliot 1827-1908
US writer and scholar

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was joint editor (with James Russell Lowell) of the North American Review (1864-68), and was a co-founder of The Nation (1865). He then became Professor of Art at Harvard (1873-97), where he instituted a course in the history of fine arts as related to society and general culture. A personal friend of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and many other leading literary figures, he wrote on medieval church-building, translated Dante's Divina Commedia (1891-92), edited the poems of John Donne (1895) and Anne Bradstreet (1897), and the letters of Carlyle (1883-91).