Robert Wilson (editor)

[2] From 2004 to 2022 he edited The American Scholar, the literary journal published by Phi Beta Kappa society.

Wilson has also written three biographies set in nineteenth-century America and edited a collection of essays from Preservation.

[13] Wilson edited the 2002 book A Certain Somewhere: Writers on the Places They Remember, a collection of essays from Preservation magazine.

[17] Some other reviewers were more critical, noting that the book devoted little space to the later, problematic parts of King's life.

[26] Rachel Shteir wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the book “eschews cliches for a more nuanced story” and “is a life for our times, and the biography Barnum deserves.”[27] Historian John F. Kasson wrote in The Journal of American History that Wilson’s “new, relatively short biography is amiable, witty, judicious, and satisfying,” but warned that “it does not greatly alter our understanding of Barnum.”[28]