White, Richard Grant, 1821–85, American journalist, writer, and Shakespearean scholar, b. New York City. He had a varied career and was at different times music critic and coeditor (1851–59) of the New York Courier and Enquirer, a founder and editor (1860–61) of the World, and chief clerk in the New York Customs House (1861–78). In 1853 he published a series of articles in Putnam's Magazine that exposed as fraudulent the marginalia that John Payne Collier had discovered on certain Shakespearean manuscripts. White's own annotated 12-volume edition of Shakespeare appeared from 1857 to 1866 and was republished, in three volumes, as The Riverside Shakespeare in 1883. His other works include a Handbook of Christian Art (1853) and two dogmatic manuals of English usage—Words and Their Uses (1872) and Every-Day English (1880).
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