Paul Elmer More

Paul Elmer More was an American critic, editor, classicist, and teacher whose career joined newspaper reviewing with sustained work in philosophy and literary history. Rutgers records his service at The Independent, the New York Evening Post, and The Nation, followed by teaching at Princeton and Harvard. Benjamin Franklin, published in 1900, belongs to his early biographical writing. The Jessica Letters appeared in 1904 as a collaborative epistolary romance with Corra Harris, who wrote the letters attributed to Jessica while More supplied the editor Philip's side of the correspondence. Project Gutenberg preserves the book under its fuller title, The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance, and identifies both authors. These two works show different parts of More's range before the long Shelburne Essays series became central to his reputation: concise historical biography in Benjamin Franklin, then a jointly constructed exchange about affection, literature, philosophy, and belief in The Jessica Letters.