Charles Eliot Norton (November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908) was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England.

Norton graduated from Harvard in 1846, where he was a member of the Hasty Pudding, and started in business with an East Indian trading firm in Boston, traveling to India in 1849.

[2] After a tour in Europe, where he was influenced by John Ruskin and pre-Raphaelite painters, he returned to Boston in 1851, and devoted himself to literature and art.

[3] He translated Dante's Vita Nuova (1860 and 1867) and the Divina Commedia (1891-91-92, 3 vols, 1902 being the publication year of Norton's thorough final edit).

He worked tirelessly as secretary to the Loyal Publication Society during the Civil War, communicating with newspaper editors across the country.

[5][6] According to Turner (1999), "Probably only someone with Norton’s experiences and scholarly range – who had written about the Mound Builders, roamed India, organized classical archaeology, scoured medieval archives, published nineteenth-century painting – could have concocted Western Civilization.

During this period, he began friendships with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Edward FitzGerald and Leslie Stephen, an intimacy which did much to bring American and English men of letters into close personal relation.

[3] He "centered his teaching upon the golden ages of art history -- classical Athens, the Italian Gothic style of Venetian architecture, and the Florence of the early Renaissance.

[3] In 1886, he opposed the opening of a "drinking saloon" on the main street near his home, in a letter which reveals little empathy for, or understanding of the significance of, Irish immigration to Cambridge in that era.

[11] Like his friend Ruskin, Norton believed one of the best things one could do for working-class people was to give them opportunities to gain satisfaction by engaging in workmanship, as opposed to monotonous routine labor where they have to work like machines.

One of his many students at Harvard was James Loeb, who in 1907 created the "Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectureship" in archaeology.