Noah Webster and William Holmes McGuffey, who made important contributions to reading and education, present an interesting study in comparison and contrast. Although Webster is remembered most as a lexicographer, his speller contributed greatly to the early teaching of reading in the United States. His literary activities as a patriot, a nationalist, and an educator desiring that America should achieve a linguistic identity apart from England were effective and impressive. A prodigious worker, scholar and writer whose writing touched many fields, he was also an active participant in religious and community affairs, an admirable husband and parent, and a businessman of energy and integrity. By contrast, McGuffey was a professor and preacher whose name was associated with the greatest publishing enterprise in American history. His reader was an improvement upon Webster's speller, and eventually replaced it as the most important medium of American reading instruction. Apart from reading instruction, the McGuffey reader also gave to the nineteenth-century American child a common value-laden body of literary reference and allusion. However unsophisticated those nineteenth-century reading instruction methods and materials may now appear, they did provide a common heritage and helped shape the American character and values of the time. (HOD)