Charles Eliot Norton was a poet, social critic, and art professor from the United States. He was a radical social reformer and a political revolutionary who was deemed the most cultivated individual in the United States by many of his peers. He was an American scholar and man of letters, an idealist and temperamental reformer who displayed a wide variety of unusual energy activities. Norton founded a night school in Cambridge after graduation from Harvard in 1846, was head of a housing experiment in Boston, and served zealously as an editor for the Union cause during the Civil War. He was the North American Review co-editor from 1864 to 1868, and he helped found The Nation in 1865.