The New International Encyclopædia/Godwin, Parke

GODWIN, (1816-1904). An American journalist and author. He was born in Paterson, N. J., February 25, 1816, and after graduating at Princeton in 1834, practiced law for a short time in Kentucky, but after 1837 was for many years in the main connected with the New York Evening Post, of which the poet Bryant, his father-in-law, was for so long chief editor. Godwin conducted in 1842 a weekly, the Pathfinder, contributed much to the Democratic Review, was one of the editors of Putnam's Magazine, deputy collector in the New York Custom House under President Polk, and an early member of the Republican Party, though a consistent advocate of free trade. Two volumes of essays from Putnam's Magazine are gathered in Out of the Past (1870). Among his numerous other publications may be mentioned: A Popular View of the Doctrine of Fourier (1844); Democracy, Civic and Constructive (1844); Vala: A Mythological Tale (1851); Political Essays (1856). Godwin compiled a Handbook of Universal Biography (1851), and Cyclopædia of Biography (1863). He edited the Works of W. C. Bryant, with a Life (1884), and made translations from the prose of Goethe, Fouqué, and Zschokke. He also wrote an ingenious but rather erratic New Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1901).