Henry Walcott Boynton was born in 1869 in Guilford, Connecticut. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1891, and his Master of Arts in 1893, both from Amherst College. From 1892 to 1901 Boynton was head of the department of English at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. After 1901 he devoted himself to writing. He was chief reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly from 1901 to 1904. He was on the regular staff of the Nation and the New York Evening Post beginning in 1912. He wrote criticism for the Bookman beginning in 1915. Boynton died in 1947.

Boynton was the author or editor of at least twenty-four books, often using his pseudonym, John Walcott. His works include: Life of Washington Irving (1901); The Golfer's Rubaiyat (1901); Bret Harte (1903); A Reader's History of American Literature (1903, with T.W. Higginson); Journalism and Literature (1904); Guenever, a Romantic Play (1905); The World's Leading Poets (1911); James Fenimore Cooper (1931); and Annals of American Bookselling (1932). Boynton's edited texts with introduction and notes include: Selections from Carlyle (1895); Tennyson's The Princess (1896); Milton's Paradise Lost (1897); Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1899); Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1901); Mrs. Ewing's Jackanapes (1902); Miss Martineau's The Prince and the Peasant (1902); Pope's Complete Poetical Works (Cambridge edition) (1902); Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1903); and Selected Poems for Secondary Schools (1911).