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Hyatt Howe Waggoner was an English professor. He is today best known for his work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially Hawthorne's Selected Tales and Sketches, Hawthorne: A Critical Study and The Presence of Hawthorne, and in 1978 played a pivotal role in the authentication of the great novelist's "lost notebook". In the year of Waggoner's death, he was honoured with the House of Seven Gables Hawthorne Award. He did not, however, confine his output to one author: "I've moved around the field," he declared, "at the risk of being superficial." Among the other literary giants who incurred his attention were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman and William Faulkner.
In his youth Waggoner attended a single-room school in upstate New York, and later Middlebury College, where out of the science-religion conflict he found fully his Christian faith, writing to his Presbyterian pastor that he could not go on as merely a "nominal Christian".
The year after his 1935 graduation from Middlebury, he received his master's degree from the University of Chicago, and in 1939 began teaching at the University of Omaha, which he left in 1942 when he took his Ph.D from Ohio State University. From 1942 to 1956, he was a professor at the University of Kansas City, whose English department he headed from 1952 to the end of his tenure, when he transferred to Brown University. John Shroeder, one of his students at Kansas, who later became a Brown English professor himself, recalled of Waggoner's lectures:
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