He edited the works of Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, Joel Chandler Harris, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

After his graduation, he was a special student at Harvard in fine arts and philosophy.

In 1890, he became literary adviser for D. Appleton & Company, in which capacity he edited Edward Noyes Westcott's narrative David Harum (1898) into a bestseller, later made into a film.

[1] He unfanged Stephen Crane's lewd details and Theodore Dreiser's irony.

[2] Ripley Hitchcock died at the Park Avenue Hotel in Manhattan on May 5, 1918.