In 1867, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow completed the first
Americantranslation of Inferno and thus introduced Dante's literary
genius to theNew World. In the Inferno, the spirit of the classical
poet Virgil leadsDante through the nine circles of Hell on the
initial stage of his journeytoward Heaven. Along the way Dante
encounters and describes in vividdetail the various types of
sinners in the throes of their eternal torment.HENRY WADSWORTH
LONGFELLOW, American poet, educator, andlinguist, wrote many long
narrative poems, including The Song ofHiawatha, Evangeline, and The
Courtship of Miles Standish.MATTHEW PEARL is the author of the
novel The Dante Club, pub-lished by Random House, and is a graduate
of Harvard University andYale Law School. In 1998 he won the
prestigious Dante Prize fromthe Dante Society of America for his
scholarly work. He lives in Cam-bridge, Massachusetts.
LINO PERTILE is a professor of Romance languages and literature
atHarvard University. He specializes in Dante and the Latin Middle
Ages.