Rossiter Johnson

Most men who write for a living, if they are remembered at all in after years, are apt to be recalled for some single piece of work, and the achievement thus distinguished is rather likely to be something which the reader valued more highly than the author did himself. Rossiter Johnson, in his ninety-one years of life and sixty years of professional activity, engaged in a long list of literary undertakings. Probably he himself looked most indulgently on his books of American history, his work for the Standard Dictionary and his collaboration in editing “Fifty Perfect Poems.” But the reading public, especially of the older generation to which he addressed himself, will always associate Rossiter Johnson with the “Little Classics.” Few private bookshelves in the Seventies or Eighties lacked that series of highly readable pocket-size volumes. Overnight guests, who used to thumb forlornly the dreary literature with which parlor table and guest-chamber were decorated in those days, would cheer up on discovering a Little Classic with its half-dozen notable short stories. They were rescued from widely-scattered periodicals of a still older generation, were selected with infallible taste and judgment and, but for Johnson, they would have passed into oblivion.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1932 Century Association Yearbook