Bulfinch's Mythology is a collection of general audience works by Latinist and banker Thomas Bulfinch, named after him and published after his death. The work was a highly successful popularization of Greek mythology for English-speaking readers. Carl J. Richard comments that it was "one of the most popular books ever published in the United States and the standard work on classical mythology for nearly a century," until the release of classicist Edith Hamilton's 1942 Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes . The book is a prose recounting of myths and stories from three eras: Greek and Roman mythology, King Arthur legends, and medieval romances. The stories are interspersed with his own commentary and with quotations from the writings of Bulfinch's contemporaries which contain a reference to the story under discussion. This combination of classical elements and modern literature was novel for his time