From the early 19th century until his death in 1859, Leigh Hunt was a significant and controversial man of letters. He was an essayist, poet, literary and theater critic, playwright, editor, journalist, founder of periodicals and political radical. It was his keen eye for literary talent, however, that enabled him to make his most important contributions. At the height of his career, Hunt’s close friends, whose careers he helped to advance, included the Romantic poets John Keats, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and the esteemed essayists Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Later, Charles Dickens and Alfred, Lord Tennyson were encouraged by him and became his friends.

Anthony Holden, known for his biographies of Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Prince Charles and Laurence Olivier, superbly chronicles Hunt’s ambitions, literary feuds and chronic financial problems in The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable Life and Times of Leigh Hunt Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics. The title comes from Byron, who wrote those words in a verse letter to a friend before the first of his many visits to Hunt during the two years the latter was imprisoned for libeling the Prince of Wales.

Hunt considered personal essays he wrote for his journal Indicator to be his best writing, while his friend Thomas Carlyle praised Hunt’s Autobiography as by far the best book of the autobiographic kind in English. At the other extreme, desperate for money, Hunt wrote a commercially successful book that was notable for its assault on Byron, with whom he had had a falling out. Holden writes, While Hunt was reviled on all sides for ingratitude towards a man who had offered him substantial patronage, his bestseller was as avidly (if guiltily) read as are all such indiscreet memoirs of the famous. Holden’s well-researched and wonderfully readable biography of Hunt shows us the literary life in a very productive period among writers whose works are still widely read and admired today.

Blaine McCormick’s clever book, Ben Franklin: America’s Original Entrepreneur, entices the entrepreneurial muse by mining the good doctor’s autobiography for the business lessons it contains.

McCormick, a Franklin scholar and an associate dean at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, has shaped a unique adaptation of the original work, revising its often abstruse language and syntax, and reorganizing the narrative into a three-part chronology that traces the beginnings, development and maturation of this successful 18th-century entrepreneur.

The result is a solid business primer and intriguing portrait of America’s foremost businessman, statesman, scientist, inventor and diplomat. Franklin’s life story, full of common sense, creative genius and psychological insight, has been distilled into palatable chapters, embellished with McCormick’s trenchant analysis of Franklin’s business acumen and peppered with apt quotes from his incomparable Poor Richard’s Almanac.

McCormick also includes informational tidbits about current business leaders and practices that relate to the lesson at hand: a young Franklin, motivated primarily by thrift, extols vegetarianism. Is it any wonder that Corn Flakes inventor W.K. Kellogg and Apple Computer maven Steve Jobs would follow suit? McCormick views Franklin as the founding father of American business, and notes that the great man clearly intended, as proven by a letter written shortly before his death, that his autobiography will be of more use to young readers; as exemplifying the effect of prudent and imprudent conduct in the commencement of a life of business.

The models are many and all are useful in today’s business vernacular, whether they involve a moral lesson, like the one learned after a youthful indiscretion involving minor theft, or a strategic maneuver, as when Franklin gains community cooperation for public projects by using the power of advertisements and contracts (both, of course, printed for profit by Franklin’s own press).

This book’s streamlined approach holds much for history and business buffs and, in accordance with McCormick’s dearest wish, may sufficiently pique readers’ interest to return to Franklin’s original text to study it with greater appreciation.

British biographer Amanda Mackenzie Stuart’s first book characterizes the force and influence of motherhood in a literary double biography, Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age. Visiting Blenheim, the grandiose English seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, Stuart became intrigued by a docent’s implication that the 9th Duchess, American-born heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, was a prisoner in her marriage, but that she got out in the end. Then, while exploring the nearby family burial ground, Stuart found an inscription on Consuelo’s gravestone indicating that she had clearly remarried. So why had she come back? Perplexed, Stuart wondered if the innocent, 18-year- old Consuelo was forced into a loveless marriage. Rudimentary research revealed that Consuelo’s strong-willed mother, Alva, though initially infamous for masterminding the most ambitious match of the Gilded Age, later became known for her powerful leadership in the international suffrage movement. Was this eventual social activism Alva’s self-imposed penance for coercing her daughter to marry a virtual stranger? With alacrity and ingenuity, Stuart has probed two lives in a quest to understand the landscapes of one. Her mountainous research has been rendered into an empathic portrait of daughter and mother, social philanthropist and feminist respectively, amid the social and economic flagrancies of the Gilded Age and the eroding aristocratic culture of Britain’s nobility. She opens with a suspenseful, fiction-like prologue chronicling Consuelo’s wedding day: we observe curious crowds lining the route to New York’s St. Thomas Church; we marvel at the opulent floral displays and watch Mrs. Astor escorted to her seat; we hear the strains of the wedding march. But we cannot yet see the bride, for she has not appeared. As the delay lengthened, the guests shuffled and whispered. . . . Five minutes passed . . . then ten . . . then twenty . . . The remaining reportorial narrative primarily follows the life of an American heiress-turned-duchess, but Consuelo and Alva also portrays the often desperately empty ways of 19th-century New York society and of the British aristocracy; the charged symbiosis between mothers and daughters; and the emerging movement for female liberation from suffocating social mores. It is a first-rate first-time effort.