Thomas Bulfinch

Thomas Bulfinch (1796–1867) was an American writer whose retellings of classical and medieval legend introduced generations of readers to mythology. The son of the architect Charles Bulfinch, who designed the Massachusetts State House and completed the United States Capitol, he graduated from Harvard in 1814, tried teaching and business without success, and from 1837 worked as a clerk in the Merchants' Bank of Boston, writing in his spare time. The Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858) and Legends of Charlemagne (1863), later gathered as Bulfinch's Mythology, retold Greek, Roman, Norse, Arthurian and Carolingian stories for readers without Latin or Greek, with quotations from the English poets.