1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Allibone, Samuel Austin

ALLIBONE, SAMUEL AUSTIN (1816–1889), American author and bibliographer, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 17th of April 1816, of French Huguenot and Quaker ancestry. He was privately educated and for many years was engaged in mercantile business in his native city. He, however, devoted himself chiefly to reading and to bibliographical research; acquired a very unusual knowledge of English and American literature, and is remembered as the compiler of the well-known Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (3 vols.: vol. i. 1854, vols. ii. and iii. 1871). To this, two supplementary volumes, edited by John Foster Kirk, were added in 1891. From 1867 to 1873, and again in 1877–1879, Allibone was book editor and corresponding secretary of the American Sunday School Union; and from 1879 to 1888 he was librarian of the Lenox Library, New York City. He died at Lucerne, Switzerland, on the 2nd of September 1889. In addition to his Critical Dictionary he published three large anthologies and several religious tracts.

See the “Memoir” by S. D. M‘Connell, an address delivered before the Historical Society of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1890).