HENRY SALT: HUMANITARIAN REFORMER AND MAN OF LETTERS, by George Hendrick, University of Illinois Press, 1977. 228pp. $10
Henry Salt was well equipped by temperament to write one of the best books on Thoreau. He viewed him from England, but with the searching inquiry of Dr. Samuel Arthur Jones, Daniel Ricketson and others, about details and characterizations that didn’t ring true in Sanborn and Channing, he was able to respond to the essential Thoreau.
But this is a biography of Henry Salt, and an excellent one, telling of his friendship with Shaw and Gandhi. Salt was born in 1851 and died in 1939. His activities as writer and reformer (socialism, vegetarianism, prison reform, among others) are clearly presented here in just the right amount of detail. Salt’s earlier biography by Shaw’s neighbor Stephen Winsten is gossipy, discursive and, as they say of wines, “doesn’t travel well.” Clearly Professor Hendrick here spanned the Atlantic as well as Henry Salt did in his search for Thoreau.
The Concord Saunterer, Vol. 12 No. 4, Winter 1977, p. 21
Book Reviewed: Henry Salt, Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters