Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars cover the entire range of Longfellows work from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period Evangeline The Song of Hiawatha to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War Tales of a Wayside Inn. Separate contributions discuss Longfellows financial dealings his preoccupation with his children and his interest in the visual arts as well as the tremendous role his poetry did and will once again play in American literature classrooms in the U.S.